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Introduction
For many decades, a cultural practice has existed that
has avoided being named or fully categorized. Its
roots are in the modern avant-garde, to the extent
that participants place a high value on experimentation and on engaging the unbreakable link between representation and politics. Perhaps this is a
clue as to why this practice has remained unnamed
for so long. Since the avant-garde was declared
dead, its progeny must be dead too. Perhaps this
brood is simply unrecognizable because so many of
the avant-garde’s methods and narratives have been
reconstructed and reconfigured to such an extent
that any family resemblance has disappeared along
with its public face. To intensify matters, participants are neither fish nor fowl. They aren’t artists
in any traditional sense and don’t want to be caught
in the web of metaphysical, historical, and romantic signage that accompanies that designation. Nor
are they political activists in any traditional sense,
because they refuse to solely take the reactive posi-
4
Introduction
tion of anti-logos, and are just as willing to flow
through fields of nomos in defiance of efficiency
and necessity. In either case, such role designations
are too restrictive in that the role boundaries exclude access to social and knowledge systems that
are the materials for their work. Here may be a final link to invisibility: these participants value access over expertise, and who really cares about the
work of an amateur?
All good things must come to an end. The naming
and defining has begun along with a more structured flow in the form of a movement with numerous subcampaigns. The process began in 1993 when
a coalition of Dutch cultural groups produced an
event/scene in Amsterdam called the Next 5 Minutes (N5M). The topic of the event was “Tactical
Television” (so named by Dutch cultural theorists
involved in the production who were inspired by
de Certeau’s work, The Practice of Everyday Life).
The event drew all kinds of people from Europe
and North America who were concerned with issues of intervening in television, theorizing the
structure and dynamics of video culture, modeling
representations of political causes that further social justice, creating alternative models of distribution, and so on. The event was small (around three
hundred people), but it indicated that a new kind
of coalition was beginning to form. Event organizers quickly realized that tactical television was too
limited in its scope, because there were people with
a similar sensibility who were doing tactical work
in all types of media, and that they should all come
together. The event’s next manifestation in 1996
addressed the topic “Tactical Media” (as it did again
in 1999). This time the event was more international, and included all forms of media, although
Introduction
5
the conversation was skewed toward electronic
media (radio, TV, the Internet).
A name that would stick had emerged, along with
a basic definition that was provided by the organizers of the N5M:
The term “tactical media” refers to a critical usage
and theorization of media practices that draw on all
forms of old and new, both lucid and sophisticated
media, for achieving a variety of specific noncommercial goals and pushing all kinds of potentially subversive political issues.
These moments of solidarity via linguistic recuperation are usually accompanied by mixed feelings, and
this particular case was no different. On the one
hand, there was a feeling of caution and perhaps
regret. Once named and defined, any movement is
open to co-optation. Should tactical media become
popularized, its recuperation by capital is almost inevitable. Definitions also create boundaries. What
was once so liquid would become increasingly structured and separated as the movement was theorized
and historicized.
On the other hand, joy can emerge out of separation that expresses itself as generative difference.
There was a feeling of relief that those involved in
tactical media could be any kind of cultural hybrid. Artist, scientist, technician, craftsperson,
theorist, activist, etc., could all be mixed together
in combinations that had different weights and intensities. These many roles (becoming artist, becoming activist, becoming scientist, etc.) contained
in each individual and group could be acknowledged and valued. Many felt liberated from having
6
Introduction
to present themselves to the public as a specialist
in order to be experts (and therefore valued). It
was a vindication of the proto-anarchist Fourier’s
idea that pleasure and learning come from what he
termed the “Butterfly”—the human desire to access as many active processes and learning resources
as possible, or to put it negatively, an aversion to
boredom caused by redundant specialized activity.
Some of Guattari’s ideas were also vindicated in
the sense that this group developed a liberating
collective arrangement of enunciation that denied
linear separation. While this situation was not the
beginning of a molecular revolution (although it
may prove to be so), it was a molecular intervention. For a brief time there was and continues to be
a relief from capital’s tyranny of specialization that
forces us to perform as if we are a fixed set of relationships and characteristics, and to repress or
strictly manage all other forms of desire and expression. Participants knew that a practical process
had been collectively started by many groups and
individuals from around the globe (mostly by parallel invention) for a real politicized interdisciplinary practice, and that the methods needed to actualize this practice were being researched and
tested the world over.
On a more personal level, the members of Critical
Art Ensemble (CAE) had mixed feelings on the
subject. To be named seemed restrictive, and in
more paranoid moments, even murderous. However, since CAE was always being named whether
the collective liked it or not, to have a designation
members were comfortable with was good. We had
escaped the unbearable weight of being artists, and
within the specialization of art we could separate
Introduction
7
ourselves from site-specific artists, community artists, public artists, new genre artists, and the other
categories with which we had little or no sympathy. Because the collective did not appear to be
engaged in a particular practice, we were being
saddled with such designations, or found ourselves
complicit with this categorizing process just so we
could start conversations with people uncomfortable with the unnamed.
The collection of traits from which a tactical media
practice emerges is bound to change depending on
who is asked what these traits are. There is a constant shifting of value that parallels shifts in the
roles of any given individual involved in the practice, so an individual can change he/r point of view
very rapidly. In conjunction, cultural context plays
such a significant part in the tactical media user’s
perception that the model has to be constantly
reconfigured to meet particular social demands. Tactical media is not a monolithic model, but a pliable one that asks to be shaped and reshaped. It
contains many different and often contradictory
conjectures, but it has a few principles that seem to
have general value (although there are always exceptions).
First, tactical media is a form of digital interventionism.* It challenges the existing semiotic regime
by replicating and redeploying it in a manner that
offers participants in the projects a new way of seeing, understanding, and (in the best-case scenario)
* By “digital” CAE means that tactical media is about copying, recombining, and re-presenting, and not that it can only be done with
digital technology. Please see Chapter 5, Part I, for a more detailed
discussion of the issue.
8
Introduction
interacting with a given system. The already given
and the unsaid are the material of a tactical media
event. As Stanley Aronowitz says about the
postmodern thinker: “We deconstruct the
‘givenness’ to show the cracks that sutures have
patched, to demonstrate that what is taken as privileged discourse is merely a construction that conceals power and self-interest.” Much the same can
be said about the tactical media practitioner, the
difference being that rather than just doing critical
reading and theorizing, practitioners go on to develop participatory events that demonstrate the critique through an experiential process.
The tactical media practitioner uses any media necessary to meet the demands of the situation. While
practitioners may have expertise in a given medium,
they do not limit their ventures to the exclusive
use of one medium. Whatever media provide the
best means for communication and participation
in a given situation are the ones that they will use.
Specialization does not predetermine action. This
is partly why tactical media lends itself to collective efforts, as there is always a need for a differentiated skill base that is best developed through collaboration.
In conjunction, tactical media practitioners support and value amateur practice—both their own
and that of others. Amateurs have the ability to
see through the dominant paradigms, are freer to
recombine elements of paradigms thought long
dead, and can apply everyday life experience to their
deliberations. Most important, however, amateurs
are not invested in institutionalized systems of
knowledge production and policy construction, and
hence do not have irresistible forces guiding the
Introduction
9
outcome of their process such as maintaining a place
in the funding hierarchy, or maintaining prestigecapital. One of the most recent examples of this
trend is the tremendous job that amateur scientists
and health care practitioners did and are continuing to do in shaping policy regarding HIV. Now
most experts wouldn’t recognize these people as scientists or health care providers; they were simply
concerned individuals dedicated to social justice
who collectively had an impact on policy construction. Their expertise primarily came from everyday life experience and amateur study, and yet this
collection of people who rallied in coalitions such
as ACT UP had remarkable vision and continue
to have an impact.
Tactical media is ephemeral. It leaves few material
traces. As the action comes to an end, what is left
is primarily living memory. Unfortunately, as feminist performance theorist Rebecca Schneider has
convincingly pointed out, no one has solved the
haunting problem of the archive, an issue first isolated by Derrida. Tactical media rarely escapes the
problems of secondary representation, and the few
material trace elements, subservient and partial
records of an immediate lived experience, often appropriate the value of the experiential process. After the event is over, photos, scripts, videos, graphics, and other elements remain, and are open to
capitulation and recuperation. In spite of such problems, the situation is not entirely disastrous. Traces
and residues are far less problematic than strategic
products, which come to dominate the space in
which they are placed. Monumental works are the
great territorializers—they refuse to ever surrender
space. Instead they inscribe their imperatives upon
it and disallow anything other than passive view-
10
Introduction
ing. They are the great negaters of generative difference, and are engines of alienated separation.
But unlike monumental works (whether these are
in fact monuments proper, or even worse, movements, coalitions, campaigns, or programs that become bureaucracies), the trace is stratified in its
interpretive structure, so no matter how quickly and
profoundly it is assimilated, it still contains the possibility of radical action. This possibility redeems
the trace because it can offer the makings of minor
histories that render credible the beliefs that something different from the inhumanity of capital is
possible, and that a continued capacity for direct
autonomous action and its initiation can lessen the
intensity of authoritarian culture. Aiming for this
possibility, tactical media is always ad hoc and selfterminating.
In the following pages the reader will find theoretical and documentational traces of tactical media. CAE does not present these cases so much as
models but as possibilities. They are simply modest illustrations of the broad material and content
base of tactical media. We trust that they indicate that no cultural bunker is ever fully secure.
We can trespass in them all, inventing molecular
interventions and unleashing semiotic shocks that
collectively could negate the rising intensity of authoritarian culture.
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1
Electronic Civil Disobedience,
Simulation, and the Public Sphere
What counts in the long run is the “use” one makes
of a theory…. We must start from existing practices
in order to retrace the fundamental flaws.
– Felix Guattari, Why Marxism and Freudianism
No Longer Disturb Anyone
In 1994, when Critical Art Ensemble first introduced
the idea and a possible model of electronic civil
disobedience (ECD) as another option for digital
resistance, the collective had no way of knowing
what elements would be the most practical, nor did
it know what elements would require additional
explanation. After nearly five years of field testing
of ECD by various groups and individuals, its information gaps have become a little more obvious and
can finally be addressed. Of particular concern in
this essay is the recent turn of events that has proThis article was originally published as a catalogue essay for the Next
Five Minutes 3, 1999.
14
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
duced an ECD model that opts for public spectacle
over clandestine policy subversion, and that emphasizes simulated action over direct action. CAE
contends that these are unfortunate currents in the
general research on ECD. CAE still believes that
ECD is an underground activity that should be kept
out of the public/popular sphere (as in the hacker
tradition) and the eye of the media, and that
simulationist tactics as they are currently being used
by resistant forces are only modestly effective if not
counterproductive.
Civil Disobedience in the Public Sphere
Those familiar with CAE’s modeling of ECD* know
that it was an inversion of the model of civil disobedience (CD). Rather than attempting to create
a mass movement of public objectors, CAE suggested a decentralized flow of particularized microorganizations (cells) that would produce multiple
currents and trajectories to slow the velocity of capitalist political economy. This suggestion never sat
well with more traditional activists, and recently
even Mark Dery (in both Mute and World Art) criticized the model because there would be conflicting goals and activities among the cells. To the contrary, CAE still holds that conflicts arising from the
diversity of the cells would function as a strength
rather than as a weakness; this diversity would produce a dialogue between a variety of becomings that
would resist bureaucratic structure as well as pro*For more information: All CAE books, including Electronic Civil Disobedience, are available from Autonomedia (NYC) or they can be
downloaded free of charge at <http://www.critical-art.net>. German
(Passagen Verlag), French (l’Éclat), and Italian (Castelvecchi) translations are also available; unfortunately they are not available on-line,
so contact CAE for more information.
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
15
vide a space for happy accidents and breakthrough
invention. If resistant culture has learned anything
over the past 150 years, it’s that “the people united”
is a falsehood; this concept only constructs new exclusionist platforms by creating bureaucratic monoliths and semiotic regimes that cannot represent or
act on behalf of the diverse desires and needs of
individuals within complex and hybridizing social
segments.
The second key inversion of the model of CD was
to aim directly for policy shift, rather than trying
to accomplish this task indirectly through media
manipulation. CAE’s position is still that the direct approach is the most effective. The indirect
approach of media manipulation using a spectacle
of disobedience designed to muster public sympathy and support is a losing proposition. The 1960s
are over, and there is no corporate or government
agency that is not fully prepared to do battle in the
media. This is simply a practical matter of capital
expenditure. Since mass media allegiance is skewed
toward the status quo, since the airwaves and press
are owned by corporate entities, and since capitalist structures have huge budgets allotted for public
relations, there is no way that activist groups can
outdo them. A sound bite here and there simply
cannot subvert any policy-making process or sway
public opinion when all the rest of the mass media
is sending the opposite message. Any subversive
opinion is lost in the media barrage, if not turned
to its opposition’s advantage through spin.
There was a time when CD and media manipulation combined were successful in disrupting and
shifting authoritarian semiotic regimes. The civil
rights movement is an excellent example. The
16
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
movement’s participants understood that the Civil
War was still being fought on an ideological level,
and hence one social/political/geographic region
could be turned against another. The northern and
western regions of the U.S. had advanced not only
in terms of industry, but also in their methods of
public (and particularly minority) control. The
Civil War had eliminated the retrograde political
economy of the south, but had failed to shift its
ideological structure (a far more difficult element
to change), and hence had not altered its symbolic
mechanisms of control. All the civil rights movement needed to do was to call attention to this failure, and the fully modern northern regions would
force the south to comply with an ideological position that would be more compatible with the socioeconomic needs of advanced capital. The images produced through acts of civil disobedience
suceeded in provoking outrage at the retro-ideology of the south and rekindled the state of war between the regions. Student volunteers, community
organizers, and eventually federal police agencies
and the military (mobilized by the executive office) became allies and fought for the movement.
At the same time, the civil rights leaders were not
naive about this matter. They knew that the only
racist policies that would change were those not
held by the north and that racism was not going to
disappear; it would only be transformed into a more
subtle form of endocolonization, as opposed to its
then current status as an explicit set of segregationist norms. Indeed, the general understanding of
African Americans—that there was a hard boundary beyond which policy would shift no further—
was key in the rapid decline of the civil rights movement and in the high-octane fueling of the black
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
17
power movement. Unfortunately, the latter fared
no better with its media campaign, because it lacked
the infrastructure to support its own material needs.
As a means of media manipulation, CD worked
in the case of the civil rights movement because
the historical dynamic of capitalism acted as the
foundation for its success. History was still heterogeneous and the normative manifestation of
capitalist ideology was still a striated space at both
the national and international levels. But what
do we do now, having reached the point where
visible, diversified ideologies in the West no longer
exist, and history is nothing more than a homogeneous construct that continuously replays capitalist victories? From where will public outrage
originate? What army, government, corporation,
or any other power base will support the
disempowered when exploitive endocolonial relationships are precisely what allow these agencies to flourish? This is why CAE has argued for
direct confrontation, by using financial leverage
obtained through blocking privatized information
(since this form of information is the gold of late
capital). Appropriating media gains nothing in undermining an authoritarian semiotic regime because no power base benefits from listening to an
alternative message; however, appropriating profit
through blocking information sends a clear message to any chosen capitalist institutions—for
them, it may be cheaper to change policy than to
defend militarily a semiotic regime under pressure.
Accomplishing this task is possible in the virtual
realm, and it takes only the most modest of investments to act (compared to forming an army);
however, for such resistance to endure requires
clandestine activity.
18
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
Currently, the one weak exception to rejecting
(E)CD as a means to manipulate mass media is in
cases where history and ideology have not been
homogenized. These tend to be situations in which
a resistance movement is in conflict with a dominant power that is still viewed by pancapitalism as
being in some form different from itself. For instance, the democracy movement in China used
CD and media manipulation with a degree of success. Outrage was generated; however, rigid national boundaries kept it from manifesting in any
way useful for the movement other than the granting of asylum by western countries for those who
had to flee the Chinese authorities, and in generating a modest amount of diplomatic pressure on
China. Even in this best-case scenario (and in a
way very similar to what occurred during the civil
rights movement), while the ideological order of
pancapitalism was offended, the western economic
order perceived China to have more similarities
than differences, and hence little was done by the
“outraged” west to support the democracy movement or to materially undermine the Chinese infrastructure.
ECD and Simulation**
Very early on in the development of electronic media,
Orson Welles demonstrated (perhaps accidentally)
that simulation has material effects. The simulation of a news broadcast reporting that aliens had
invaded earth had the effect of causing a minor
panic among those caught in the hall of mirrors
that emerged out of the implosion of fiction and
**CAE would like to thank Heath Bunting for his valuable contribution to CAE’s development of a simulationist model of subversion.
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
19
nonfiction created by the broadcast. Only varying
degrees of plausibility existed as to the truth of
the story. Simultaneously, all information was true
and all information was false in that historic moment of an erupting hyperreal. We have seen a
replay of this narrative in the 1990s with regard
to resistant electronic culture, but with some peculiar differences.
In an addendum written in 1995 for ECD and Other
Unpopular Ideas, CAE noted that there was growing paranoia among U.S. security agencies about
controlling the electronic resistance. Oddly
enough, these agencies scared themselves with their
own constructions of electronic criminality. It was
much like Welles being scared of his own broadcast. In that comic moment, CAE ironically suggested that ECD was successful without ever having been tried, and that merely announcing that
some form of digital resistance could occur could
have the effect of creating a panic in security agencies to such a degree that their primary focus would
become locked in the hyperreality of criminal constructions and virtual catastrophe. This is a comment that CAE wishes it had never made, as some
activists have come to take it seriously and are trying to act on it, primarily by using the Web to produce hyperreal activist threats to fan the flames of
corporate-state paranoia. Again, this is a media
battle that will be lost. State panic and paranoia
will be transformed through mass media into public paranoia, which in turn will only reinforce state
power. In the U.S., the voting public consistently
supports harsher sentencing for “criminals,” more
jails, and more police, and it is this hyperreal paranoia that gets law-and-order politicians the votes
needed to turn these directives into legislation.
20
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
How many times must we see this happen? From
McCarthyism to Reagan’s fear of the Evil Empire
to the War on Drugs, the result in each case has
been more funds for military, security, and disciplinary agencies (fully mandated by an already fearful and paranoid voting public), and this in turn
tightens the endocolonial belt. Considering that
the U.S. is currently involved in the rapid creation
and expansion of security agencies devoted to policing electronic criminality (and since these agencies make no distinction between politically motivated action and criminality for profit), it seems
misguided to give power vectors increased means
for raising public support for this military growth,
as well as a basis for increased national and international legislation regarding political management
of new electronic media.
Whether simulationist tactics could be used in a
more compelling way is difficult to say. Since the
CIA and the FBI have been using these tactics for
decades, it is easy to locate examples that could be
inverted. One of the classics is the CIA’s toppling
of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in order
to support United Fruit, protect oil interests, and
undermine a democracy with such leftist leanings
that it legitimized the communist party within the
U.S. sphere of influence! To be sure, the CIA built
its operational infrastructure well by using economic sabotage to create unrest, but the final act
was one of electronic subversion. The CIA simulated field radio broadcasts of antigovernment troop
movements around the capital. Upon intercepting
these broadcasts, the Guatemalan government became convinced that a large rebel army had been
mustered and was preparing for an attack. To the
contrary, the public was overwhelmingly support-
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
21
ive of the government, and only a modest rebel faction existed. Unfortunately, government officials
panicked and the government fell in disarray.
The FBI used a similar means of subversion by employing hyperreal communications in its attack on
the Black Panthers. Much like the CIA’s intervention in Guatemala, the FBI’s infowar had a strong
infrastructure. The Bureau had infiltrated the Black
Panther Party (BPP) and was close to the high command, so it knew the nature of (and the players in)
the party’s internal struggles. It had also successfully used local law enforcement to harass chapters
across the U.S. The party’s treasury was perpetually depleted due to the persistent arrests of members by police, who intentionally abused their power
in order to drain party funds by forcing the membership to continually post bail for those detained.
Given these conditions, paranoia was the order of
the day for the Black Panthers, and when the schism
between the San Francisco and the New York chapters erupted, the FBI saw a perfect opportunity to
implode the party. As a result of a simple letterwriting campaign that fanned the flames of mistrust between east and west leadership, the party
collapsed amid its own internal fighting. (The FBI’s
campaign consisted of the creation and delivery of
documents that criticized specific leaders and their
party policies; these documents were made to look
as if they originated from internal party opposition.)
This method could be inverted and turned against
authoritarian agencies. The infighting that already
occurs within and between government and corporate institutions makes them self-subsidizing targets. The military and economic infrastructure that
was necessary for the operations in the examples
22
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
given here is not necessary for ECD operations,
since the internal warfare is already occurring
(given capital’s tendency toward predation, fear and
paranoia are a part of everyday life experience for
those deep within power vectors, and hence no
expenditure is necessary to create them, as was necessary with the BPP). Certainly, carefully written
and directed letter(s)/e-mail messages could have
an implosive effect (although it’s doubtful that a
full collapse would ensue); however, the lessons
learned from these classic cases of simulationist tactics have to be understood and applied. First and
most obvious, this form of resistance would be covert. Second, reliable insider intelligence would
need to be acquired. This is the most problematic
area in this kind of tactical maneuvering, although
it is not impossible to find solutions. For
simulationist tactics of resistance to be successfully
employed, methods and means of research, intelligence gathering, and informant recruitment have
to be developed. (CAE is willing to bet that the
next breakthrough paper on resistance will address
this very problem of amateur intelligence generation.) Until that occurs, subjective-subversive action will be pretty ineffectual. At present, those
not involved in a fully developed covert approach
can only act tactically in regard to the strategic principles of an institution rather than to specific situations and relationships. Obviously enough, a tactical response to a strategic initiative makes no
sense. In all probability such action will not have
the desired effect, and will only alert the agency
being hit to prepare for potential external pressures.
We must also remember that simulationist infowar
is only a destructive tactic—it is a way to cause
institutional implosion, and has very little produc-
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
23
tive value in terms of policy reconstruction. To continue with the example of racism, agencies that
have institutionalized racist policies (and that includes pretty much every institution in the
pancapitalist regime) will not be changed by an
infowar of institutional attrition. The semiotic regime of racist policies will continue untouched in
other institutions that are interrelated through the
shared privilege acquired by maintaining such policies. CAE still insists that productively challenging institutions will not occur through nihilistic gestures, but instead through forcing changes in the
semiotic regime on an institutional basis while leaving the material infrastructure intact for
reinscription.
The Problem of Containment
Marshalling the materially destructive tendencies of
hyperreality has other problematic consequences
when these destruction codes are released into the
spectacle. Most notable is the problem of containment. If an authoritarian agency believes itself to
be under attack, or under the threat of attack (deferred virtual catastrophe), and it is in the public
limelight because of this, it will lash out in a less
than predictable way. It may act in a manner that
is injurious to itself, but it is just as likely that it
will act in a way that could endanger unsuspecting
elements of the public sphere. Introducing the public into the formula forces the threatened agency
to face one major consequence: In order to keep up
with the speed of the infosphere, it must act quickly.
Hesitation, even to allow time for reasonable analysis and reflection, is not an option. In the current
marketplace of public relations, success and failure
have imploded, and all actions, when represented
24
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
well, reside in the sphere of hyperreal success and
victory. The only useful distinction to be made is
between action and inaction. Inaction is the sign
of weakness and ineptitude. Caught in this highvelocity vector, a threatened agency will take action that will be explosive (not implosive). Scapegoats will be designated, and action detrimental to
these individuals or populations will follow (the
perfect macrocosm of this sequence of events is U.S.
foreign policy and the actions taken on its behalf).
In other words, once this sequence of destruction
was initiated by threat (whether virtual or actual),
the often uncontrolled forces that would be released
could not be contained or redirected by the resistant force. This inability to contain the explosion
links this model (in effect only) to terrorism. Not
that the activists are initiating terrorist practice,
since no one dies in hyperreality, but the effect of
this practice can have the same consequence as
terrorism, in that state and corporate power vectors will haphazardly return fire with weapons that
have destructive material (and even mortal) consequences.
What is odd is that such action would not be taken
out of a concern for infrastructure, but for the
semiotic regime and the entity’s public image in
hyperreality. However, when the public is taken
out of this formula, the sequence changes dramatically. The agency under pressure would not have
to act quickly. It could have time to investigate
and therefore be able to deliver a more surgical
strike, because the sign of weakness (the public
perception of inaction) would not be damaging
its intended public representation. In this worstcase scenario for the activists, the response would
be far more directed, and hence the consequences
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
25
would tend to fall on those who actually took the
risk of initiating the action. If the agency were
unaware that it was under subversion and an implosion occurred, the public would not be notified or feel the direct consequences (although indirect ones such as unemployment are probable).
In either case, there would be no violent explosive spinoff of shrapnel that could land anywhere
in the landscape of resistance. In other words, containment would be actualized. What is of additional interest is that the agency under pressure
would subsidize containment activity. No agency
wants to publicize that it is in financial trouble,
that its security has been breached, etc., and hence
it would contain itself. However, if the public is
introduced into the formula, then the likelihood
of containment evaporates and the consequences
become less than civil. For this reason CAE continues to believe that all useful models of ECD
(or for that matter, nearly all political as opposed
to consciousness raising and pedagogical actions***) within the current political conditions
have in common covert action and an abhorrence
of mass media as a theater of action.
***A pedagogical situation/action gives participants the opportunity to escape some form of taken-for-granted authority. In this
moment of liberation, they can think about alternative possibilities in relation to the specific or general issue addressed. This
kind of work is the domain of politicized cultural action. However, such action is only pedagogical, not political. It prepares
the consciousness of individuals for new possibilities, and in the
best cases, moves them to political action. Activity inspired by
pedagogical situations, however, is political action. By political
action, CAE means the temporary or permanent redistribution
or reconfiguration of power relationships (material or semiotic).
We would also like to note that the distinction between these
categories should not be assumed to be totalizing, but rather represents a general tendency in the typology of activist action.
26
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
Writing the Discourse on ECD
Given the desire to keep the mass media out of the
discourse on ECD, CAE thought it wise to close
with a few suggestions on how to speak semipublicly
about what should only be discussed among trusted
companions. This is an old problem, so fortunately
there are some precedents—most notably the
Frankfurt School. Its strategy was to write in the
most dense, arcane style imaginable so that only
initiates into the fold could decipher it; in this
way the discourse stayed out of the public sphere
where it did not become a resource for market
cooptation. Happily, we do not have to go to such
lengths. The writing can be clear and accessible,
but it should be made to resist the eye of the media. Fortunately this is easy to do. All that is necessary is to make it “bad copy.” This is why CAE
speaks in terms of general models and
hypotheticals (and never about specific actions).
Not only would we not want to make specifics
public for obvious reasons, but generalities (models) are not very interesting to the grand majority
of the popular media audience. Models are bookish and slow, and in the fast-paced image barrage
of popular spectacle, they are simply boring.
CAE also suggests looking to historical analogues
for examples of tactical actions, particularly ones
that were activated by authoritarian power vectors.
None of the popular media is particularly interested
in more talk about “olden times,” nor are they interested in past atrocities (except for those perpetrated by Nazis). Discussion of such topics leaves
the media with nothing interesting to bring to the
public. This strategy goes back to issues of constellations, detournement, appropriation, etc. Use what
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
27
is already available, give the media vultures nothing, and the only option for cooptation left is cannibalism (hence the proliferation of retro). Now
clearly, it’s too late to stop media cooptation of
ECD. It has already been sold for fifteen minutes of
fame, and is fueling a new round of cyberhype, but
e-activists can bring a halt to this current media
event by supplying nothing more. We can also be
thankful that ECD and other forms of electronic
resistance that have now been dematerialized into
the hyperreal buzz of “hacktivism” are just more
cyberfads that will rapidly fade on the
technohorizon, leaving the committed to continue
with business as usual.
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2
The Mythology of
Terrorism on the Net
The “wired world” is often presented and perceived as
a world without borders. To some extent this idea
is true, particularly when one is analyzing how the
Internet is used by various military organizations
and multinational corporations; however, in a general sense, the Internet is not a world without borders. It does not exist in a vacuum. For example,
when an individual logs onto the Net, h/er perception of the electronic experience is partly shaped
and framed by the socialization practices of that
person’s native country, and hence the experience
has national and/or ethnic qualities. The mythologies of the Net that perhaps might seem most relevant to an individual are also partly determined
This essay was originally a lecture given at Ars Electronica at Mythos
Information in Linz, Austria, in 1995. While some elements seem a little
dated, there are enough useful ideas regarding current debates on electronic civil disobedience that make this lecture worth printing. (While
this lecture did go unpublished in English, it was published in German
in Springer, and in Finnish in the anthology Sähköiho.)
30
The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net
by geography, class, and cultural identity. The development of the mythologies through which the
meaning of the Net is constructed, or more accurately, imposed, typically arise out of national interests. To sum up, the Net is culturally and politically bordered, and its meaning is constructed under the authority of capital’s variables of separation. For this reason CAE feels bound to make the
following qualification: As CAE proceeds to discuss the mythology of terrorism on the Net, please
remember that the position developed here comes
from the perspective of those facing the political
struggles against the rampant forces of
authoritarianism in the U.S. Consequently, some
of our comments may not be applicable to the European or world situation in general. It can also
be said with a degree of certainty that a number
of elements in this discussion will not be applicable to third world countries where terrorism still
is considered to have limited revolutionary significance. On the other hand, CAE does hope that
this essay will contribute to a comparative study
of perceptions of the meaning and function of terrorism on the Net.
It was an experience that CAE had in London that
drew the group to this topic of terrorism and the
Internet. In the fall of 1994, the collective was
speaking at the Terminal Futures conference held
at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London. The
topic was “electronic civil disobedience.” During
the question-and-answer period at the end of the
talk, an audience member said that what we were
suggesting was not a civil tactic of political contestation at all; rather, the tactic that we had suggested
was “pure terrorism.” CAE found this comment to
be very curious because we could not understand
The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net
31
who, or more to the point, what this audience member thought was being terrorized. How can terror
happen in virtual space, that is, in a space with no
people—only information? Have we reached a
point in civilization where we are capable of terrorizing digital abstractions? How was it that this
intelligent person had come to believe that electronic blockage equaled terror? This is an unusual
puzzle that CAE would like to take the first steps
toward solving.
Let us begin by briefly describing terrorism as a political action. Terrorism is a strategic form of contestation, in which the resistant faction attacks the
designated oppressor by using tactics of near-random violence against its citizenry. The resistant faction seeks two consequences through such actions:
First, to create a panic that will sweep through the
population. The panic originates when members
of the public have a perpetual apprehension of their
own mortality, due to what is perceived to be a consistent state of violence. If this panic can be maintained for a long enough period of time, the public
will eventually demand negotiations to end this
socio-psychological state of discomfort.
Second, this strategy is used in the hope that the
oppressor will show its true face—one of extreme
authority. That is, the oppressor will exert extreme
control over its population in a militaristic manner. Two crucial events occur when the symbolic
order of domination collapses and the material order of the military takes over. First, from the point
of view of the citizens, “basic” freedoms are sharply
curtailed; if this condition is maintained for long
enough, terrorists believe that the citizens will eventually shift blame for their apparent lack of au-
32
The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net
tonomy from the terrorist organization to the state.
Second, resistant factions tend to believe that the
state will not be able to maintain the financial drain
on its resources caused by constant use of military
force. Unlike the deployment of spectacle, deployment of the military is exceedingly expensive, and
there is no return on the investment other than
temporary moments of social order. Due to financial constraints, the oppressor is eventually forced
to come to the bargaining table. Terrorism then is
not a revolutionary strategy, but one designed to
force negotiation over policy.
The essence of terrorism is twofold. First, there is a
public perception that terrorist violence is uncontrollable. Second, terrorism requires organic bodies to house the terror. But since terrorist violence
cannot occur on a very large scale (since it is cellular in nature), a third component is required—an
apparatus that can and will spread the spectacle of
fear in a manner that blankets the given territory.
We know this apparatus as “the media.” The
terrorist’s violence allows he/r to appropriate this
apparatus, and use it to deploy the type of fear that
s/he sees as most advantageous. This final component is what leads us to understand that terrorism,
as a necessary radical strategy in the first world, is
an anachronism. The control of spectacular space
is no longer the key to understanding or maintaining domination. Instead, it is the control of virtual
space (and/or control of the Net apparatus) that is
the new locus of power. For information economies,
the Net, along with various intranets, are the apparatus of command and control. Since the division of labor has reached a plateau of unforeseen
complexity, the most costly disaster that can happen in these economies is a communication gap;
The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net
33
this would cause the specialized segments of the
division of labor to fall out of synch. Those who
are electronically literate and dedicated to resisting both state authority and the hegemony of
pancapitalism can use this development to great
advantage. Through simple tactics of trespass and
blockage, these resisters can force the state, military, and corporate authorities to come to the negotiating table. Placing the public in a state of fear
is no longer necessary, nor is it essential to inflict
violence on people in order to incite political
change. And oddly enough, not even private property needs to be attacked or destroyed. All that is
needed to accomplish what terrorism rarely does—
policy negotiation—is to deny access to data conduits and bodies of data.
The most powerful weapon against authoritarianism
has been delivered into the hands of the left, and
yet we are letting it slip away. This is what truly
worried CAE about the audience member’s comments at the London ICA. The inherent civility of
electronic disobedience is being deliberately and
officially misconstrued under the signs of that which
it is clearly not—terrorism, or more modestly, criminality. Most of the resistance on the Net confines
itself either to offering alternative information services or to organizing around issues of autonomy,
such as free speech. To be sure, these issues are important, but they are also secondary. However, the
most important issue is not being discussed, and
that is the demand for the right for people to use
cyberspace as a location for political objection. Currently in the U.S., the punishment for trespass or
for blockage in cyberspace is jail on the first offense. We must demand that a distinction be made
between trespass with political intent and trespass
34
The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net
with criminal intent. For civil disobedience in
physical space the penalty in the U.S., if one is
arrested at all, is usually a $25 fine and a night
in jail with one’s fellow demonstrators. The state
can be generous here, since such tactics are purely
symbolic in the age of nomadic capital. Such generosity is not shown when the political action
could actually accomplish something. This is a
situation that must be changed.
But let us return to our original enigma, why an
intelligent person would believe that civil disobedience is actually terrorism, when it is clear
that electronic resistance has no relationship
to terrorism in any tactical sense—no one dies,
no one is under any threat. Further, it seems
clear that the myth of electronic terrorism originates in the security state and in the U.S., at
any rate, is deployed by state agencies such as
the FBI and the Secret Service as well as by spectacular institutions such as Hollywood. How are
people being duped by such obvious ploys?
CAE’s belief is that the prevalence of this myth
reflects a subtle yet major shift in the validation of reality. The problem stems not so much
from the efficiency of the state propaganda machine, but from a condition which is much more
fundamental—an inclination to accept the idea
of virtual terror.
The origins of this predisposition in the realm of
the social are difficult to pinpoint, but probably
began with the realization that power can be
grounded in information. The first complex
manifestation of this form of power is the bureaucracy—a very ancient form indeed. From the
earliest days of the bureaucracy, official records
The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net
35
began to take on the status of official reality.
What has changed since the days of papyrus and
scrolls is that the organization of information has
become amazingly efficient, since the invention
of computers with their massive space-saving
memories combined with accurate systems for
immense storage and high-velocity retrieval.
Combine these powers with computer networking capabilities, which transform information
into a nomadic phenomenon, and the dominance
of information reality becomes unstoppable. Information management is now generally perceived as a science of tremendous precision. And
with the understanding of this activity as a science comes an authority and a legitimacy that
cannot be disputed; after all, science is, for better or for worse, the master system of knowledge
in secular society.
Let us return to the idea of the record. From an
existential point of view, the record, optimized
by the electronic information apparatus, has
taken the form of horrific excess. Each one of us
has files that rest at the state’s fingertips. Education files, medical files, employment files, financial files, communication files, travel files, and
for some, criminal files. Each strand in the trajectory of each person’s life is recorded and maintained. The total collection of records on an individual is h/er or her data body—a state-andcorporate-controlled doppelgänger. What is most
unfortunate about this development is that the
data body not only claims to have ontological
privilege, but actually does have it. What your
data body says about you is more real than what
you say about yourself. The data body is the body
by which you are judged in society, and the body
36
The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net
that dictates your status in the social world.
What we are witnessing at this point in time is
the triumph of representation over being. The
electronic file has conquered self-aware consciousness.
Herein lies a substantial clue as to why some people
fear the disruption of cyberspace. While the organic body may not be in danger, the electronic
body could be threatened. Should the electronic
body be disrupted, immobilized, or (heaven forbid) deleted, one’s existence in the realm of the
social could be drastically effected. One could
become a social “ghost,” so to speak—seen and
heard, but not recognized as real. The validation
of one’s existence could disappear in the flick of
a keystroke. Once a population has accepted the
notion that representation justifies one’s being
in the world, then simulacra begin to have direct material effects on the motivations and perceptions of people, allowing the security state and
other keepers of information to exert maximum
control over the general population. No doubt
the erasure of social existence is a threat that
strikes terror into people’s hearts. This is, in part,
why CAE believes it has been so easy to deploy
the sign of terrorism on the Net. This is also
partly why CAE members were accused of terrorism when we suggested using tactics of civil
disobedience on the Net. Once we moved CD
out of the realm of the physical, where disruption is localized and avoidable for those who accept their data body as their superior, we were
suggesting their erasure as a consequence of political objection. What is frightening to CAE
about this scenario is that electronic erasure is
perceived as equivalent to being killed in a bomb
The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net
37
explosion. Now the perception exists that the
absence of electronic recognition equals death.
With such considerations in mind, those who
plan to continue the fight against
authoritarianism, and who support maximum
individual autonomy, have two important
projects to complete. First, organic being in the
world must be reestablished as the locus of reality, placing the virtual back in its proper place as
simulacra. Only in such a situation can virtual
environments serve utopian functions. If the virtual functions and is perceived as a superior form
of being, it becomes a monstrous mechanism of
control for the class that regulates access to it
and mobility within it. The continuing calls for
consolidation, fencing, and privatization of the
Internet are indicators that resistance is behind
in this battle. Second, steps must be taken to
separate political action in cyberspace from the
signs of criminality and terrorism. The current
state strategy seems to be to label as criminal
anything that does not optimize the spread of
pancapitalism and the enrichment of the elite.
If we lose the right to protest in cyberspace in
the era of information capital, we have lost the
greater part of our individual sovereignty. We
must demand more than the right to speak; we
must demand the right to act in the “wired world”
on behalf of our own consciences and out of goodwill for all.
page 38 has an image
3
The Promissory Rhetoric of
Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
Just as the Christian soul has provided an archetypal concept through which to understand the
person and the continuity of self, so DNA appears
in popular culture as a soul-like entity, a holy and
immortal relic, a forbidden territory. The similarity
between the powers of DNA and those of the
Christian soul, we suggest, is more than linguistic
or metaphorical. DNA has taken on the social and
cultural functions of the soul. It is the essential
entity—the location of the true self—in the
narratives of biological determinism.
—Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee
Popular wisdom in western culture has long told us
that science is our new religion. This trope has been
repeated regularly since Turgenev’s creation of the
nihilistic Bazarof and Nietzsche’s pronouncement
Originally published in Utopia (Contemporary Sociology Series.
Québec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval).
40
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
of the death of God. Like most propositions derived from popular perception, there is an element
of truth in it. Science is the institution of authority
regarding the production of knowledge, and tends
to replace this particular social function of conventional Christianity in the west. In keeping with this
position, science has slowly but surely become a
key myth maker within society, thus defining for
the general population the structure and dynamics
of the cosmos and the origins and makings of life,
or, in other words, defining nature itself. Much as
religion once defined the human role in the cosmos, science does the same in such a way that the
political economy of the day seems to be a part of
nature and attuned to its laws and imperatives. Certainly the theory of evolution is an example of science fulfilling the ideological needs of capital.
Science has never been very comfortable with its
designation as the new religion, and rightly so. After all, the analogy is very loose, since science and
religion share very few master narratives. The rhetoric of science has also generally strayed far from the
rhetoric of theology. Science has developed its own
language to represent itself to the public (i.e., those
outside any scientific specialization), and the roots
of its language are in the secularized speech of the
Enlightenment. However, in the relationship between science and the public, we find a second suggestion of why science is often perceived as the new
religion. Science is a key mediator of the public’s
relationship with nature, much as the Roman
Catholic Church in medieval times mediated its
public’s relationship with God. Perhaps the Greens,
with their simple, personal relationship with nature, could be our modern-day Protestants. Again,
the analogy can start to get pretty silly when pushed
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
41
too far, but in light of the new biotech revolution,
this exercise may be a necessity.
As the key knowledge producer for capital, science
finds itself in a subservient middle-management position. Popular wisdom fails us when one notes that
science as an institution is not the Church of Innocent III. It is by no means a general seat of power;
its power lies only in the particulars of knowledge
production. Indeed, this position is one of privilege, but it has definite limits. It must account for
itself, and do so in the way that capital demands by
showing that its knowledge production is profitable (particularly in the form of application, hence
the marriage of science and technology). Should it
fail in this endeavor, it will not be the great mediator of nature for long; however, science has been
very successful at impressing its boss for the past
century, and shows no signs of retiring. It is willing
and able to exclusively serve the needs of capital,
not just by generating knowledge that can be applied for profit, but also by not generating any
knowledge or applications that could be detrimental to the maintenance and/or expansion of the system (for example, science has avoided creating a
car that does not use fossil fuel).
In order to justify the selective nature of this variety of service, to impress and excite the various
classes that monitor and distribute the investment
capital marked for research and development, and
to uphold its spectacle as a benevolent institution
providing great marvels to the general public, science has constructed a rhetoric of promise derived
from Enlightenment political principles to deploy
either as a spectacle of seduction or deflection. This
rhetorical system is most evident when the knowl-
42
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
edge meets the public in the applied form of new
technology. From the building of railways to the
construction of the Internet, utopian promises regarding the latest technological phenomenon have
deluged us. And like those in every generation since
that of the mid-19th century, critics of technology
have tried to puncture these inflated claims (although usually with only modest success). While
much of this rhetoric does come from scientists for
the reasons given above, they alone are not to
blame. These promises only continue to inflate
when redeployed by the marketing and media
agents of capital and by a broad variety of capital’s
ideologues. In this generation considerable time has
been spent on critiquing the value of the Internet
by leftist thinkers such as Pit Schultz, Geert Lovink,
Richard Barbrook, Konrad Becker, Lev Manovich,
Inke Arns, Oliver Marchart, Matt Fuller, Mark
Dery, Critical Art Ensemble, and many others. They
have endeavored to deflate the promises of marketers in their many guises, to reveal the ideological infrastructure of the technology and its representation, and to demonstrate that even the smallest utopian possibility contained in the rhetoric
would probably not be generally realized by most
of the world’s population.
While the promises made about technology are
many and appear in various permutations, they tend
to fall into four main categories—democracy, liberty, efficiency, and progress. Democracy appears
as the notion that everyone will be empowered by
the new technology, and thereby have increased
agency within the social realm. For example, one
promise is that new transportation technology (the
elder of the techno-revolutions birthed with
capital’s commitment to trains) will create a cos-
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
43
mopolitan state in which no one is restricted by
spatial limits. Of course there is no real gain, only
relative gain. Class structure replicates itself in the
technology. Class strata reveal themselves in who
can go farther, faster, more often, and in what degree of comfort. While a less privileged person can
travel farther than ever before if so inclined, the
relative distance between what members of different classes can and are likely to do remains about
the same (or increases).
Liberty is usually presented in terms of freedom from
restrictive social elements. This promise can take
many forms. Liberation from drudgery in the form
of work is an example of a typical form; however,
decades of technoculture have taught us only that
the greater the intensity of technology, the greater
the workload. Much the same is true of efficiency.
Improved efficiency only means more profit and
speed for capital, while the implied promise of individual benefit never seems to materialize. Taken
together, a working definition of progress emerges
that means nothing more than the expansion of
capital, but presents itself as advancement of the
common good.
This collection of rhetorical truisms has worked well
for over a hundred years, ushering in numerous innovations both mechanical and electrical, both
analogic and digital, with strong public support. As
the biotech revolution is being set into motion, the
standard practice of parading the utopian principles
of bourgeois society should be happening again, but
strangely enough, it isn’t. The problem is that history is disrupting the deployment of another round
of the same old promises. Biology tried to have its
social revolution once before (before it was tech-
44
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
nically ready to carry it out), when it was believed
that Darwinism could explain the nature of biological process and its relationship to social
“progress.” The usual promises were made: real democracy would emerge through biological engineering, because all citizens would be fit agents for political action. A truly self-aware, self-generating
equality would emerge. People would be liberated
from biological destiny by controlling it themselves,
and would be able to apply the values and morals
of society to the production of the flesh. In this
manner, biological progress would parallel technological progress.
What appeared instead was the horror show of eugenics that spawned unspeakable atrocities. The
utopian mask fell from capital’s face, and the sight
was repulsive: selective breeding, forced abortions
and sterilizations, and in the worst cases, genocide.
All excess populations (i.e., those of no use to capital) were viciously attacked or done away with. At
the other end of the spectrum (positive eugenics),
capital worked on a biological means to replicate
the populations it required by socially rewarding
those who bred for health, intelligence, and moral
character.
The eugenic initiative sliced a wound so deep into
the social body that it has yet to fully heal. To this
day it remains a painful memory that is almost impossible to acknowledge. In the U.S., eugenics is
considered something dead and best forgotten. Few
American authorities acknowledge that the U.S.
was a leader in eugenic philosophy and practice.
The feeling is that it happened somewhere else
(probably in Germany, where there were Nazis).
Unfortunately for the new generation of geneticists
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
45
and molecular biologists, the utopian rhetoric that
once served other science and technology producers so well is now tainted. Using such language could
raise up ghosts from the past that are better left to
rest. Since the public has already seen the true
face of capital and its plans for the flesh (invasion
and instrumentalization), it would not be wise to
use representation that could encourage remembrance of this vision, because it could lead to a
popular condemnation of the new trajectory of
flesh sciences.
The question now is, what rhetoric can be used to
represent the new biological initiative so that it
can keep its distance from eugenics? If the secular
rhetoric of the Enlightenment is off limits, then
what is left? One good place to turn is the utopian
rhetoric of Christianity (and the Roman Catholic
Church in particular).* The Church survived the
eugenics movement reasonably unscathed—at least
to the extent that it was not seen as a primary initiator of the movement, and in some cases was an
open critic of it. Why the Church acted this way is
open to question. Clearly, the idea that creation
could be appropriated by humans would not sit well
with the Church, and hence its position was to defend its belief system from a secular hubris that was
out of control. However, one could also argue that
*The other useful model is cybernetics. This postwar model unquestionably dominates the rhetoric within the various specializations in
biology, but loses its dominance outside the specialization. Whether
theological or cybernetic rhetoric is employed often depends on the
public being addressed. For example, technocrats tend to appreciate
the language of cybernetics more than the language of theology, because it is their own language. However, other publics that do not
have the investment in cybernetics tend to be a little more wary of its
reduction of the organic to code.
46
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
Church denunciation of eugenics was self-serving.
For example, between 1900 and 1920, many of the
marginalized groups in the U.S. that would be negatively affected by the eugenics movement, such as
the Poles, the Italians, and the Irish, were largely
Catholic. The Church could lose its constituency
in America, and hence its public outcry. This notion of self service is reinforced by the fact that such
protectionism wore off later in the century when
the Jews became the primary target group affected
by eugenics. Be that as it may, the rhetoric of origination and creation used by the Church remained
disassociated from eugenics, so its rhetoric is still
open to appropriation for those with the authority
to use it.
Returning to the popular wisdom that science is
our new religion, in the case of the biotech revolution there may well be an additional element of
truth. The spiritual promises of a dying institution
are now being reborn as a material reality that is
not dependent on faith. In the process, perhaps we
are witnessing another attempt to solve the conundrum of the skeptic who wants to believe. This
problem was eloquently presented by Dostoyevsky
through the character Ivan in The Brothers
Karamazov. Ivan has a desire to believe in God, but
His envelopment in mystery and otherworldliness
leaves Him unaccountable for the evils in the world.
If indeed there is a God, the empirical proof of His
incompetence is overwhelming. For instance, Ivan
saves newspaper clippings of atrocities committed
against children. How can a good and righteous
God allow such things to happen? In deciding between God and justice (the secular), Ivan feels compelled to choose justice, but suffers greatly for this
choice. Here at the next fin de siécle, this paradox
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
47
of psychological suffering is no longer so perplexing. All that was once shrouded in mystery is now
open to accountability and measurement. The
choice is neither to push through the absurd and
leap into transcendental worlds through uncompromising faith, nor side with justice at the expense
of an empty soul; rather, the best option is to understand that redemption is grounded in the material. Whether speaking of questions about a new
genesis, healing, universal connectedness, or even
immortality, the answers are to be found in molecular strata beyond operational reality; however,
this other realm can be measured, modeled, catalogued, and manipulated. Controlled access to creation, life, and the cosmos should be considered
the solution to Ivan’s dilemma.
The Quest for the New Eve
Biblical signs and symbols are entrenched in western
culture. From childhood, we are taught to recognize and interpret them. For this reason biblical
metaphor has always been an excellent resource for
specialized culture to use in speaking to popular culture. Eve is one of those symbols that is immediately recognizable, for even the undereducated and/
or the staunchly secular have had this sign of origination embedded in their cultural vocabulary. Since
the legitimation of the theory of evolution, science
has had a begrudgingly antagonistic relationship
with creationist theory, which clings to the literal
interpretation of the sign of Eve and the narrative
of Genesis. It would be best if the creationists just
went away and left science to its work, but like pesky
gadflies they keep on challenging evolutionary
theory with arguments solely supported by unfounded propositions contained in a sacred book.
48
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
As the popular wisdom of the American bumper
sticker flatly states: “The Bible says it, I believe it,
that’s the end of it.” In order to speak back to the
nonspecialized public regarding the matter of the
origin of life, science has managed to more than
swat at the creationists with its partly empirically
buttressed arguments—it has appropriated its symbol. We now have a Simian Eve—a lovely
australopithecus found in Africa, and believed to
be the oldest of our human ancestors. (One must
note that while she is the Simian Eve, she is also
known as Lucy, named for the Beatles song playing
at the moment of her discovery.) Science corrected
the Biblical misconception a second time by empirically proving that the first Homo sapiens woman
was of African origin and appeared somewhere between 100,000 and 400,000 years ago. She is known
as Mitochondrial Eve after the genetic trait used to
trace her origin and clock her age. The broad approximation of her age is due to uncertainty among
scientists as to how the mitochondrial clock works.
One thing they do agree on is that the first Homo
sapiens is older than the 6,000 plus years that Christian fundamentalist scholars claim for Eve.
The Human Genome Project has one last Eve for
science to offer us. She is the one who will help the
public understand the beginning of a second genesis—one that is not beholden to any reproductive
boundaries that once separated the species—and
to understand it as a good thing. She is Eve without the fall—an Eve of perpetual grace, but most
amusingly, she is a random Eve.
The mythology of this Eve goes as follows, although
the narrative tended to vary slightly with each scientist CAE interviewed: When the Human Ge-
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
49
nome Project (HGP) began its mission of mapping
and sequencing the entire human genome, it
needed DNA in order to start. Since HGP was an
academic/government initiative, ethics committees
were established to make sure that this genetic investigation did not go into territories best left unexplored. One of the concerns among all the participants was to insure that those who donated
blood to the project would do so anonymously, so
their identities would be protected from the media
and various objecters to the project who might harass willing participants. A review board with strict
procedures was set up to insure the privacy of blood
donors. However, after the first donor was approved,
no other donors were needed. The DNA of the first
approved volunteer was mass produced (copied) as
needed. Why go to the trouble and expense of having any more? After all, one donor is sufficient for
the project’s needs. What is known about this donor is that she is a woman from Buffalo, New York.
She is the Eve of the second genesis. It will be a
curious sight to see if she, too, is labeled by science
with the sign of origination.
New Nature
The ability to copy and recombine presents a cosmological paradox. On the one hand, the creatures of
earth, plant and animal, great and small, no longer
have any essential traits. Postmodern theory made
this proposition years ago, claiming that all qualities are a matter of performativity grounded in the
social, and are always already becoming other. To
prove their proposition, theorists scoured the planet
for evidence that contradicted biological universals. For example, Judith Butler followed this formula when studying human sex and gender. In or-
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The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
der to show that gender was a category of becoming rather than being, she struck directly at medical and social essentialism by citing examples of
persons who had male genitalia but double X chromosomes, and hermaphrodites who had both male
and female genitalia. This demonstrated that the
choice of gender is an arbitrary medical determination reinforced by the dramaturgy of everyday
life. While these biological manifestations are relatively rare, they occur regularly enough to call into
question any universalist claim about gender. Now
that DNA can be replicated and spliced at will,
the concept of the individual (or any living thing)
as a temporary set of organic relations could become an operational norm. Even Butler would
have to admit that, just ten years ago, gendering
was bounded by the limits of sexual reproduction.
In the new version of nature, there are no limits.
The species is completely boundless (in fact, the
idea of a species may now be a biological anachronism). DNA is DNA is DNA, and so the DNA
from one species can be recombined with the
DNA of another. The DNA could come from hundreds of donors, all from different species. To use
Guattari’s terms, we are now literally becoming
plant and becoming animal. These abilities to copy
and recombine can be used to remake the world,
and design life in a manner that creates heaven
on earth, a process that molecular biologist Lee
Silver calls “remaking Eden.”
On the other hand, if all DNA is compatible, is
this not the essential link between all living creatures? Here is a new universalism—the proverbial
“we are all one” at the molecular level. Or, as
Mellon Professor of the Sciences Edward O. Wilson puts it:
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
51
We are literally kin to other organisms…. About
99 percent of our genes are identical to the corresponding set in chimpanzees, so that the remaining
1 percent accounts for all the differences between
us…. Aren’t these small steps gradually enlarging
the self by degrees until the self is identified with
more and more others?
To once again use the language of Deleuze and
Guattari, we will be able to escape the tyranny of
the arboreal that emphasizes the perception of
interspecies relationships as fragmented and separate, and thus becoming ever more remote from one
another in their complexity, and hence, forever
more specialized. Instead the living world will become viewed as more rhizomatic, with each point
immediately connected to any other point. In this
case, our own survival and development is intimately connected to that of all other living things.
This new universalism will have a dramatic impact
on how we perceive the world, and how we act in
it. For example, the new universalism will revolutionize medicine (such as in pharmacology and gene
therapy as answers to surgery and other forms of
mechanical invasion), but will also revolutionize
the very worldview of medicine itself. Many now
complain that modern medicine has become fragmented and wish to return to older holistic models. Prior to the development of western modern
medicine, western medical practice was dominated
by a form of holistic healing based on the Galenic
system of the four humors that determined the character of the person. In this model the doctor was
interested in the patient as a whole—activities
(both material and spiritual), environment, diet,
and so on. With the emergence of modern medi-
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cine in the 19th century, this type of practice was
abandoned and medical practice became much
more specialized in its interests. It focused on the
micro-level, concentrating on cellular pathologies
and micro-body invaders (i.e., germs), and de-emphasized the person as a whole or the influence of
he/r daily life on he/r health. In light of the new
universalism, medicine could return to a new consideration of the patient; anything (environmental conditions for example) that affects the molecular level (rather than focusing on the cell/germ faceoff and surgical intervention) could become significant, and therapy could be skewed toward molecular prevention rather than toward cure and symptom arrest.
To be sure, this new paradox, in which the temporary and the permanent exist in the same moment,
is going to be presented as a win-win situation.
Whether we are redesigning ourselves, or learning
to understand our natural interconnectedness in a
tangible (as opposed to mystical) way, good things
are going to happen. These promises go to the extreme of offering the material reality of immortality (and not as an angel or condemned soul). In
regard to immortality, there are cautious promises
such as this one by Professor of Biochemistry S.
Michal Jazwinski:
We are generating transgenic worms and mice to
test the hypothesis that at least some of the longevity genes isolated in yeast are important in aging in
mammals. If we can validate this notion, we will
have contributed a foundation for drug discovery
efforts aimed at ameliorating some of the deficits of
old age. This in turn would help to further our goal
for everyone to “die young at an old age.”
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
53
And wild promises such as this one from Michael Rose,
Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of California at Irvine:
Death rates go up sharply with increasing age, but
once you go off the edge of that ramp, you reach a
plateau where you are dependent on the quality of
your cell repair capability…. I believe there are
already immortal people and immortal fruit flies.
We just need to get the benefits of these genes
conferring immortality at a younger age, before we
suffer too much damage.
Some biologists are convinced that they are coming
to understand the mechanisms of aging and cell
repair. For example, one hypothesis is that every
time a chromosome directs a cell to divide, a small
piece is shaved off the chromosome’s tip. When the
tip becomes too short it stops directing the cell to
divide, and cell repair stops. As the nonreproductive cell ages it can begin to malfunction, and here
the problems of aging really begin. Biologists believe that if they can find a way to maintain the
tip, it will never give the cell the message to stop
dividing, and in this manner we can combat age,
fight certain illnesses, and perhaps live forever. This
discovery is doubly exciting because it has long been
known that some animals, turtles for example, do
not age (decay). Perhaps a lifelong process of cell
repair can be initiated in humans through molecular therapy.
As always, capital makes techno-revolutions sound
good, and to the extent that the interests of individuals and of capital overlap, the revolution will
be good. Unfortunately, we do not know how big
this overlap will be, and if we are to judge from
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The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
past experience, we can expect much more to be
worse than better. Further, while the utopian promises have yet to really manifest themselves, the numerous problems (too numerous and too great to
list here) are already manifesting themselves.
The most gruesome of these problems is the rebirth
of eugenics. This time, it is primarily a positive eugenics that has returned in a form designed to solve
the problem of workforce replication during a time
of rapid economic change and expansion.** Now
that humans have become a temporary set of biological relationships, an opportunity has arisen to
redesign their biological matrix to better fit the
needs of capital. To those who submit their offspring
for redesign, capital promises in return to give that
child a predisposition for a competitive edge in the
open market (higher intelligence, better health,
better dexterity, more desirable appearance, etc).
This form of positive eugenics is market-driven, and
pays for itself, thereby killing two birds with one
stone by achieving both profits and a better worker/
citizen. The values/needs of capital are now being
inscribed on the body at a molecular level. Just how
far this redesign process will go remains to be seen.
Currently, very simple forms of choices are offered,
such as sperm or egg donors with particular traits,
embryonic testing (at four or eight cells) followed
by embryonic self-termination if the quality is not
up to standard, selective reduction of multiple fetuses, and so on. Recombinant traits have not been
introduced yet, but given capital’s values of profit,
speed, and expansion, above all else there is no rea**See Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh Machine (New York: Autonomedia/
Semiotext(e), 1998) for a more in-depth discussion of the development
of reprotech and the parallel development of eugenics.
The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
55
son to believe the experiments in redesigning will
not continue (most likely they will be presented as
medical research).
The second major problem revolves around
privatization. Under the hegemony of capital it is
a miracle that we are not paying for air, or that there
isn’t a tax on it at the very least. However, we will
soon have to pay for our genes, because no biological resource from the molecular level on up will
remain in the public domain. All useful/profitable
genes and biochemicals from various genomes are
being privatized and patented. Emblematic of this
tendency is the patenting of azadirachtin, derived
from the neem tree of India. This tree has been
known for centuries for its general cure-all traits
(but it is particularly helpful in relieving infection)
and as a natural pesticide. W. R. Grace isolated the
plant’s most useful chemical (azadirachtin) and patented it. While the isolation process was known to
Indian companies, they did not patent it; the neem,
along with its helpful properties and the knowledge of how to use them, was considered to reside
in the public domain. After all, understanding of
how to use the medicinal and other useful properties of the tree had developed over centuries. In a
direct act of colonial aggression—eco-piracy by any
other term—W. R. Grace appropriated and now
has relative control of a traditional public resource.
The final problem is the ecological need for diversity. Biological diversity among species and within
species that share the same operational realm as
humans is beginning to dwindle. The truth of the
matter is that monoculturing is very profitable in
the short term, even though it may spell disaster in
the long term, particularly in regard to food pro-
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duction. Industrial farming is always looking for
ways to maximize land use and to grow as robust a
product as possible. Consequently, those plant varieties that are less robust or for whatever reason
require too many resources to produce are being lost.
For example, at the turn of the century there were
over 7,000 varieties of apples grown in the U.S.; now
there are less than 1,000. This interspecies diversity
is a natural defense against parasites and diseases.
Should an apple tree disease similar to the Dutch
Elm disease sweep through this population with its
diminished variety, the chance is small that one of
the varieties will have a natural defense against it.
Imagine this problem affecting already monocultured
staples like soy or wheat. Industrial farming techniques, pushed to the limits by the need to remain
competitive in price, are forcing farmers to use recombinant seeds developed by corporations. The
profit machine is on, and not even the threat of ecological disaster will turn it off.
Conclusion: On Miracles
To the philosopher of skepticism, David Hume, a
miracle is “a violation of the laws of nature.” In
Hume’s day one of these laws was that only members of the same species could breed via gendered
pairing. This is no longer true. Is the new biology a
miracle in this sense, or is it that there is no nature
left whose laws can be violated? Is all that is left a
collection of resources to be managed for the generation of profits? Many of the new miracles spoken of in this essay are truly wonderful unto themselves, but as they are assimilated into the system,
they evolve into creatures less reminiscent of those
in the peaceable kingdom of Eden, and become
more akin to the predators of the Hobbesian war of
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57
all against all. There is no rhetoric glorious enough,
not even the rhetoric of the miraculous, that can
hide humanity’s tragic trajectory under the rule of
pancapitalism.
JOIN THE
COMMUNITY
page 58 has an image
4
Observations on
Collective Cultural Action
After reviewing the current status of the U.S. cultural
economy, one would have to conclude that market
demands discourage collective activity to such a
degree that such a strategy is unfeasible. To an extent, this perception has merit. Financial support
certainly favors individuals. In art institutions (museums, galleries, art schools, alternative spaces,
etc.), the Habermas thesis, that Modernity never
died, finds its practical application. In spite of all
the critical fulminations about the death of originality, the artist, and the rest of the entities named
on the tombstones in the Modernist cemetery, these
notions persist, protected by an entrenched cultural
bureaucracy geared to resist rapid change. If anything, a backlash has occurred that has intensified
certain Modernist notions. Of prime importance
in this essay is the beloved notion of the individual
A version of this article was orginally published in Art Journal.
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Observations on Collective Cultural Action
artist. The individual’s signature is still the prime
collectible, and access to the body associated with
the signature is a commodity that is desired more
than ever—so much so that the obsession with the
artist’s body has made its way into “progressive” and
alternative art networks. Even “community art”
has its stars, its signatures, and its bodies. This final
category may be the most important. Even a community art star must do a project that includes mingling with the “community” and with the project’s
sponsor(s). Mingling bodies is as important in the
progressive scene as it is in the gallery scene. This
demand for bodily commingling is derived from the
most traditional notions of the artist hero, as it signifies an opportunity to mix with history and interact with genius.
The totalizing belief that social and aesthetic value
are encoded in the being of gifted individuals
(rather than emerging from a process of becoming
shared by group members) is cultivated early in
cultural education. If one wants to become an “artist,” there is a bounty of educational opportunities—everything from matchbook correspondence
schools to elite art academies. Yet in spite of this
broad spectrum of possibilities, there is no place
where one can prepare for a collective practice. At
best, there are the rare examples where teams (usually partnerships of two) can apply as one for admission into institutions of higher learning. But
once in the school, from administration to curriculum, students are forced to accept the ideological
imperative that artistic practice is an individual
practice. The numerous mechanisms to ensure that
this occurs are too many to list here, so only a few
illustrative examples will be offered. Consider the
spatial model of the art school. Classrooms are de-
Observations on Collective Cultural Action
61
signed to accommodate aggregates of specialists.
Studios are designed to accommodate a single artist, or like the classrooms, aggregates of students
working individually. Rarely can a classroom be
found that has a space designed for face-to-face
group interaction. Nor are spaces provided where
artists of various media can come together to work
on project ideas. Then there is the presentation of
faculty (primary role models) as individual practitioners. The institution rewards individual effort
at the faculty level in a way similar to how students
are rewarded for individual efforts through grades.
Woe be to the faculty member who goes to the tenure review board with only collective efforts to show
for he/rself. Obviously, these reward systems have
their effect on the cultural socialization process.
On the public front, the situation is no better. If
artists want grants for reasons other than being a
nonprofit presenter/producer, they better be working as individuals. Generally speaking, collective
practice has no place in the grant system. Collectives reside in that liminal zone—they are neither
an individual, nor an institution, and there are no
other categories. Seemingly there is no place to
turn. Collectives are not wanted in the public
sphere, in the education system, nor in the cultural
market (in the limited sense of the term), so why
would CAE be so much in favor of collective cultural action?
Part of the answer once again has to do with market demands. Market imperatives are double-edged
swords. There are just as many demands that contradict and are incommensurate with the ones just
mentioned. Three examples immediately spring to
mind. First, the market wants individuals with lots
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of skills for maximum exploitation—it’s a veritable
return to the “renaissance man.” An artist must be
able to produce in a given medium, write well
enough for publication, be verbally articulate, have
a reasonable amount of knowledge of numerous
disciplines (including art history, aesthetics, critical theory, sociology, psychology, world literature,
media theory, and history, and given the latest
trends, now various sciences), be a capable public
speaker, a career administrator, and possess the
proper diplomatic skills to navigate through a variety of cultural subpopulations. Certainly some rare
individuals do have all of these skills, but the individual members of CAE are not examples of this
category. Consequently, we can only meet this standard by working collectively.
Second is the need for opportunity. Given the overwhelming number of artists trained in academies,
colleges, and universities over the past thirty years,
adding to what is already an excessive population
of cultural producers (given the few platforms for
distribution), the opportunity for a public voice has
rapidly decreased. By specializing in a particular
medium, one cuts the opportunities even further.
The greater one’s breadth of production skills, the
more opportunity there is. Opportunity is also expanded by breadth of knowledge. The more one
knows, the more issues one can address. In a time
when content has resurfaced as an object of artistic
value, a broad interdisciplinary knowledge base is
a must. And finally, opportunity can be expanded
through the ability to address a wide variety of cultural spaces. The more cultural spaces that a person is comfortable working in, the more opportunity s/he has. If designed with these strategies in
mind, collectives can configure themselves to ad-
Observations on Collective Cultural Action
63
dress any issue or space, and they can use all types
of media. The result is a practice that defies specialization (and hence pigeonholing). CAE, for example, can be doing a web project one week, a stage
performance at a festival the next, a guerrilla action the next, a museum installation after that, followed by a book or journal project. Due to collective strength, CAE is prepared for any cultural opportunity.
Finally, the velocity of cultural economy is a factor. The market can consume a product faster than
ever before. Just in terms of quantity, collective
action offers a tremendous advantage. By working
in a group, CAE members are able to resist the
Warhol syndrome of factory production with underpaid laborers. Through collective action, product and process integrity can be maintained, while
at the same time keeping abreast of market demand.
These considerations may sound cynical, and to a
degree they are, but they appear to CAE as a reality which must be negotiated if one is to survive as
a cultural producer. On the other hand, there is
something significant about collective action that
is rewarding beyond what can be understood
through the utilitarian filters of economic survival.
Size Matters:
Cellular Collective Construction
One problem that seems to plague collective organization is the catastrophe of the group reaching critical mass. When this point is reached, the group
violently explodes, and little or nothing is left of
the organization. The reasons for hitting this social wall vary depending on the function and in-
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Observations on Collective Cultural Action
tention of the group. CAE’s experience has been
that larger artists’/activists’ groups tend to hit this
wall once membership rises into the hundreds. At
that point, a number of conflicts and contradictions emerge that cause friction in the group. For
one thing, tasks become diversified. Not everyone
can participate fully in each task, so committees
are formed to focus on specific tasks. The group
thus moves from a direct process to a representational process. This step toward bureaucracy conjures feelings of separation and mistrust that can
be deadly to group action, and that are symptomatic of the failure of overly rationalized democracy.
To complicate matters further, different individuals enter the group with differing levels of access to
resources. Those with the greatest resources tend
to have a larger say in group activities. Consequently, minorities form that feel underrepresented
and powerless to compete with majoritarian views
and methods. (Too often, these minorities reflect
the same minoritarian structure found in culture as
a whole). Under such conditions, group splintering is bound to occur, if not group annihilation.
Oddly enough, the worst-case scenario is not group
annihilation, but the formation of a Machiavellian
power base that tightens the bureaucratic rigor in
order to purge the group of malcontents, and to
stifle difference.
Such problems can also occur at a smaller group
level (between fifteen and fifty members). While
these smaller groups have an easier time avoiding
the alienation that comes from a complex division
of labor and impersonal representation, there still
can be problems, such as the perception that not
everyone has an equal voice in group decisions, or
that an individual is becoming the signature voice
Observations on Collective Cultural Action
65
of the group. Another standard problem is that the
level of intimacy necessary to sustain passionately
driven group activity rarely emerges in a mid-size
group. The probability is high that someone, for
emotional or idiosyncratic reasons, is not going to
be able to work with someone else on a long-term
basis. These divisions cannot be organized or rationalized away. Much as the large democratic collective (such as WAC) is good for short-term, limited-issue political and cultural action, the mid-size
group seems to function best for short-term, specific-issue cultural or political projects.
For sustained cultural or political practice free of
bureaucracy or other types of separating factors,
CAE recommends a cellular structure. Thus far the
artists’ cell that typifies contemporary collective
activity has formed in a manner similar to band
society. Solidarity is based on similarity in terms of
skills and political/aesthetic perceptions. Most of
the now classic cellular collectives of the 70s and
80s, such as Ant Farm, General Idea, Group Material, Testing the Limits (before it splintered), and
Gran Fury used such a method with admirable results. Certainly these collectives’ models for group
activity are being emulated by a new generation.
However, CAE has made one adjustment in its
collective structure. While size and similarity
through political/aesthetic perspective has replicated itself in the group, members do not share a
similarity based on skill. Each member’s set of skills
is unique to the cell. Consequently, in terms of production, solidarity is not based on similarity, but
on difference. The parts are interrelated and interdependent. Technical expertise is given no chance
to collide and conflict, and hence social friction is
greatly reduced. In addition, such structure allows
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Observations on Collective Cultural Action
CAE to use whatever media it chooses, because the
group has developed a broad skill base. Having a
broad skill base and interdisciplinary knowledge
also allows the group to work in any kind of space.
Solidarity through difference also affects the structure of power in the group. Formerly, collective
structure tended to be based on the idea that all
members were equals at all times. Groups had a tremendous fear of hierarchy, because it was considered a categorical evil that led to domination. This
notion was coupled with a belief in extreme democracy as the best method of avoiding hierarchy.
While CAE does not follow the democratic model,
the collective does recognize its merits; however,
CAE follows Foucault’s principle that hierarchical
power can be productive (it does not necessarily
lead to domination), and hence uses a floating hierarchy to produce projects. After consensus is
reached on how a project should be produced, the
member with the greatest expertise in the area has
authority over the final product. While all members have a voice in the production process, the
project leader makes the final decisions. This keeps
endless discussion over who has the better idea or
design to a minimum, and hence the group can produce at a faster rate. Projects tend to vary dramatically, so the authority floats among the membership. At the same time, CAE would not recommend this process for any social constellation other
than the cell (three to eight people). Members must
be able to interact in a direct face-to-face manner,
so everyone is sure that they have been heard as a
person (and not as an anonymous or marginalized
voice). Second, the members must trust one another; that is, sustained collective action requires
social intimacy and a belief that the other mem-
Observations on Collective Cultural Action
67
bers have each individual member’s interests at
heart. A recognition and understanding of the
nonrational components of collective action is crucial—without it, the practice cannot sustain itself.
The collective also has to consider what is pleasurable for its members. Not all people work at the
same rate. The idea that everyone should do an
equal amount of work is to measure a member’s
value by quantity instead of quality. As long as the
process is pleasurable and satisfying for everyone,
in CAE’s opinion, each member should work at the
rate at which they are comfortable. Rigid equality
in this case can be a perverse and destructive type
of Fordism that should be avoided. To reinforce the
pleasure of the group, convivial relationships beyond the production process are necessary. The primary reason for this need is because the members
will intensify bonds of trust and intimacy that will
later be positively reflected in the production process. To be sure, intimacy produces its own peculiar friction, but the group has a better chance of
surviving the arguments and conflicts that are
bound to arise, as long as in the final analysis each
member trusts and can depend on fellow members.
Collective action requires total commitment to
other members, and this is a frightening thought
for many individuals. Certainly, collective practice
is not for everyone.
Coalitions, Not Communities
While cellular collective structure is very useful in solving problems of production, long-term personal cooperation, and security (for those involved in underground activities), like all social constellations,
it has its limits. It does not solve many of the prob-
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lems associated with distribution, nor can it fulfill
the functions of localized cultural and political
organizations. Consequently, there has always
been a drive toward finding a social principle that
would allow like-minded people or cells to organize into larger groups. Currently, the dominant
principle is “community.” CAE sees this development as very unfortunate. The idea of community is without doubt the liberal equivalent
of the conservative notion of “family values”—
neither exists in contemporary culture, and both
are grounded in political fantasy. For example,
the “gay community” is a term often used in the
media and in various organizations. This term
refers to all people who are gay within a given
territory. Even in a localized context, gay men
and women populate all social strata, from the
underclass to the elite, so it is very hard to believe that this aggregate functions as a community within such a complex society. To complicate matters further, social variables such as race,
ethnicity, gender, education, profession, and
other points of difference are not likely to be
lesser points of identification than the characteristic of being gay. A single shared social characteristic can in no way constitute a community
in any sociological sense. Talking about a gay
community is as silly as talking about a “straight
community.” The word community is only meaningful in this case as a euphemism for “minority.” The closest social constellation to a community that does exist is friendship networks, but
those too fall short of being communities in any
sociological sense.
CAE is unsure who really wants community in
the first place, as it contradicts the politics of
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69
difference. Solidarity based on similarity through
shared ethnicity, and interconnected familial
networks supported by a shared sense of place
and history, work against the possibility of power
through diversity by maintaining closed social
systems. This is not to say that there are no longer
relatively closed social subsystems within society. Indeed there are, but they differ from community in that they are products of rationalized
social construction and completely lack social
solidarity. In order to bring people together from
different subsystems who share a similar concern,
hybrid groups have to be intentionally formed.
These groups are made up of people who are focusing their attention on one or two characteristics that they share in common, and who put
potentially conflicting differences aside. This
kind of alliance, created for purposes of largescale cultural production and/or for the visible
consolidation of economic and political power,
is known as a coalition.
CAE has supported a number of coalitions in the
past, including various ACT UP chapters and
PONY (Prostitutes of New York), and has organized temporary localized ones as well. One of
the problems CAE had with such alliances was
in negotiating service to the coalition while
maintaining its collective practice. Coalitions are
often black holes that consume as much energy
as a person is willing to put into them; hence
membership burnout is quite common. CAE was
no exception. After a few years of this variety of
activism, members were ready to retreat back into
less visible cellular practice. CAE began looking
for a model of coalition different from the singleissue model.
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Observations on Collective Cultural Action
One potential answer has come by way of CAE’s
affiliation with Nettime.* Nettime is a loosely knit
coalition of activists, artists, theorists, techies, collectives, and organizations from all over Europe and
North America that have come together for reasons of generalized support for radical cultural and
political causes. It has approximately seven hundred members, and has existed in various forms for
about six years. Nettime functions as an information, distribution, and recruitment resource for its
members. The core of its existence is virtual: Member contact is maintained through an on-line list,
various newsgroups, and an archive. In addition,
the coalition holds occasional conferences (the
first two, Metaforum I and II, were held in
Budapest in 1995 and 1996; Beauty and the East
was held in Ljubljana in 1997), produces and contributes to the production of cultural projects
(such as Hybrid Workspace at Documenta X), acts
as a resource for various political actions, and produces readers and books from its archive (the most
recent being README: ASCII Culture and the
Revenge of Knowledge).
From CAE’s perspective, one of the elements that
makes Nettime a more pleasurable experience is
that unlike most coalitions, it is anarchistic rather
than democratic. Nettime has no voting procedures,
committee work, coalition officers, nor any of the
markers of governance through representation.
Hierarchy emerges in accordance with who is willing to do the work. Those who are willing to run
the list have the most say over its construction. At
*The description of the Nettime coalition given in this essay is solely
from CAE’s perspective. It was not collectively written nor approved
by the Nettime membership.
Observations on Collective Cultural Action
71
the same time, the general policy for coalition maintenance is “tools not rules.” Those building the virtual architecture govern by providing space for discussions that are not of general interest to the entire list. They also direct the flow of information
traffic. Whatever members want to do—from flame
wars to long and detailed discussions—there is a
place to do it. For events in real space, the primary
rule of “those who do the work have the biggest
say” still applies. Indeed, there is considerable room
for exploitation in such a system, yet this does not
occur with much frequency because members have
sufficient trust in and allegiance to other members;
the coalition as a whole won’t tolerate system abuse
(such as spamming, or self-aggrandizing use of the
list); and there is a self-destruct fail-safe—members
would jump ship at the first sign of ownership and/
or permanent hierarchy.
Perhaps the real indicator of the congeniality shared
by Nettime members is its cultural economy.
Nettime functions as an information gift economy.
Articles and information are distributed free of
charge to members by those who have accumulated
large information assets. Nettimers often see significant works on the intersections of art, politics,
and technology long before these works appear in
the publications based on money economy. For real
space projects, this same sense of voluntarism pervades all activities. What is different here from
other cultural economies is that gift economy is only
demanding on those who have too much. No one
is expected to volunteer until they suffer or burn
out. The volunteers emerge from among those who
have excessive time, labor power, funding, space,
or some combination thereof, and need to burn it
off to return to equilibrium. Consequently, activity
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waxes and wanes depending on the situations and
motivations of the members.
CAE does not want to romanticize this form of social organization too much. Problems certainly occur—quarrels and conflicts break out, enraged
members quit the list, and events do not always go
as expected. However, Nettime is still the most
congenial large-scale collective environment in
which CAE has ever worked. The reason is that
this loose coalition began with the romantic principle of accepting nonrational characteristics. It
believed that a large collective could exist based
on principles of trust, altruism, and pleasure, rather
than based on the Hobbesian assumption (so typical of democratic coalitions) of the war of all against
all, which in turn leads to a nearly pathological
over-valuation of the organizational principles of
accountability and categorical equality. Nettime
functions using just one fail-safe system—self-destruction—and it thereby skips all the alienating
bureaucracy necessary for managing endless accountability procedures. If Nettime self-destructs,
all members will walk away whole, and will look
for new opportunities for collective action. An alliance with the temporary is one of Nettime’s greatest strengths.
Final Thought
Although they are in a secondary position in terms of
cultural organizational possibilities, cells and coalitions still present a viable alternative to individual
cultural practices. Collective action solves some of
the problems of navigating market-driven cultural
economy by allowing the individual to escape the
skewed power relationships between the individual
Observations on Collective Cultural Action
73
and the institution. More significantly, however,
collective action also helps alleviate the intensity of alienation born of an overly rationalized
and instrumentalized culture by re-creating some
of the positive points of friendship networks
within a productive environment. For this reason,
CAE believes that artists’ research into alternative forms of social organization is just as important as the traditional research into materials, processes, and products.
page 74 has an image
5
Recombinant
Theater and Digital Resistance
People are often confused by the ideas of recombination and digitality. The former typically connotes
scientific esoterica pertinent to molecular biology,
while the latter is associated with information and
communication technology. Indeed, these associations are correct, but very reductive. Recombination and digitality are not so specialized. As we
shall see, they are the foundation of a new cosmology—a new way of understanding, ordering,
valuing, and performing in the world. While some
cultural vectors have been faster to embrace digital models than others, no area remains untouched. Theater, like all of the fine arts, is now
in the process of constructing a relationship with
this new paradigm, and this is at times a very embittered struggle. The elder model of the analogic,
deeply embedded in cultural institutions, is not
voluntarily sharing any territory.
This article was originally published in The Drama Review.
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Knowledge/culture production in the west has
never been a very tolerant practice, and ideas of
anarchistic pluralism held by epistemologists such
as Paul Feyerabend have never gained much currency. The proponents of any given paradigm aim
to eliminate all competitors and thus dominate
knowledge production and the rewards that accompany such a position. Theater is no different from
any other cultural vector.
Much more is at stake than the configuration and
appearance of theater in the next century; the formation of digital theater (in the widest sense of this
term) is a struggle over the micro-sociology of the
performative matrix of everyday life. The digital
model, like the analogic, contains both apocalypse
and utopia, and the applications constructed now
will in part determine the directions in which digital processes will later flow. Capitalism is primarily
a digital political-economy, much as the medieval
economy was primarily analogic. Pancapitalism’s
use of the digital thus far has been horrifying,
whether one considers the pathological separation
and alienation of Taylorist production, the false democracy of consumption, the repressive apparatus
of surveillance, or the biotechnologies of eugenics.
Digital culture is on this same trajectory, with its
primary manifestation being an invasive mass media that functions as a re-production and distribution network for the ideology of capital.
In spite of this parade of the usual suspects that
constitute the undesirable hegemony of
pancapitalism, there has always been a resistant
cultural undercurrent in the digital. The first evidence of it appeared in 1870 when le Comte de
Lautréamont wrote: “Plagiarism is necessary.
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77
Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase,
makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and
replaces it with the right idea.” In three sentences
Lautréamont summed up the methods and means
of digital aesthetics as a process of copying—a process that offers dominant culture minimal material
for recuperation by recycling the same images, actions, and sounds into radical discourse. Over the
past century, a long-standing tradition of digital
cultural resistance has emerged that has used recombinant methods in the various forms of combines, sampling, pangender performance, bricolage,
detournement, readymades, appropriation, plagiarism, theater of everyday life, constellations, and
so on. Maintaining this historical tendency by further refining methods, finding new applications,
furthering its theoretical articulation, and increasing its rate of manifestation is an ongoing task for
those who hope to see the decline of authoritarian
culture.
Part I
The Analogic and the Digital
During the millennia it dominated, the cosmological
paradigm of an analogic universe may not have
made the world perfectly intelligible, but perhaps
it offered a sense of certainty about the cosmos to
those who lived within its enveloping hegemony.
Merely sixty years ago, no one thought that the
analogic model could ever be challenged. After all,
the sheer weight of the data compiled in its defense was immeasurable. From the phenomenology
of everyday life to the most complex abstractions
of physics, one principle of the secular world was
beyond doubt: chaos came from order, and order from
chaos. The most common experience in life was the
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construction of complex order followed by its decay. Entropy was the primary dynamic of organized
material, and the exquisite moment when order and
complexity were integrated was perceived as a brief
singularity that was impossible to precisely replicate. The fullest expressions of complex order, intimately associated with the foundation of civilization itself, were cherished and valued above all others. However, over the past fifty years this
transhistorical master-narrative, this timeless point
of assurance, has found itself in competition with
the rapidly ascending digital paradigm. As the digital model grows in influence, surrendering the values and certainties of analogic cosmology will be
difficult for many, while the various publics of fully
developed economies contend with the fragmentation and separation that accompany the emergence of a second model for understanding, organizing, and valuing phenomena. For each principle
that the analogic model holds dear, the digital
model proposes its opposite. From the smallest details to the first principle of the digital paradigm, it
acts in a manner contrary to the analogic by insisting that order comes from order.
The conflict explicitly began in 1948 when Claude
Shannon, an electrical engineer at Bell Labs, solved
the problem of how to send a clear signal over a
noisy channel. The solution was to transform the
sound into a numerical code that could be transformed back into sound when the code was received. This would prevent any other sound from
disrupting or distorting the communication process.
The history of communications technology from
that moment to the present is the operationalization
of this idea, along with deploying the hardware and
software within all communications and informa-
Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance
79
tion media. In historical terms, the analogic model
has died a surprisingly quick death in the field of
information and communications technology. The
latter half of the 20th century has truly been a revolutionary period in this respect, but the communications revolution is only the beginning. The digital model of organization is rapidly spreading to
other cultural vectors dominated by the analogic
model. While its entry into other areas of human
exploration and development may not be as dramatic (only in communications is the analogic
model in a state of total meltdown), it has appeared
in almost every sphere of human activity. The real
revolution is not computers, the Internet, or DVD;
rather, it’s the rapid change over the brief fifty years
during which we have moved from a totally analogic
worldview to one that is shared by the digital.
Digital Economy
Perhaps saying that the digital appeared approximately
fifty years ago is not quite correct. While it is true
that the idea was not formalized until the 1940s, it
had long been with us in the negative form of that
which the analogic could not explain. In fact,
whether this was understood or not, the political
economy of capital has always included facets of
the digital, and thus has created numerous digitoanalogic hybrid forms. For example, the guild system in pre-capital had some characteristics that are
best explained by an analogic model, while others
are best explained by the digital model. The high
value placed on producing unique products made
by or under the guidance of an individual artisan is
an expression of the analogic model, while replication of the workforce through strictly coded pedagogical procedures represents the digital model.
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Yet it was not until late capital that the digital became a latent foundational principle in economic
development. Complex manufacturing could not
exist without an intuitive understanding and centering of digital principles (order from order). Here
industrialists were attempting to make products in
which the original and the copy imploded—every
Ford Model T was the same as the one that preceded it and the one that followed it. Some physicists argue that no matter how sophisticated the
process may be, manufactured products are still not
exact copies, and some Taylorist consultants say that
individual products within a given product line can
vary dramatically in durability depending on
whether they are manufactured on a Monday or a
Thursday: indeed, both views are correct. The
analogic model cannot be totally dismissed. At the
same time, within operational reality, the products
are perceived and treated as being the same. They
are replications comparable to the digital copies
that I can make on my computer of this very article. The products rolling off an assembly line are
successful only to the extent that they can stand
the test of equivalence; that is, the process offers
an ongoing flow of sameness, of order from order.
Hybridization of the two models seems even more
peculiar when one considers the western style of
marketing these products. The consumer must hold
two opposing values simultaneously. On the one
hand, the consumer wants the assurance of reliability provided by digital replication, and on the other
hand, desires to own a unique constellation of characteristics to signify he/r individuality. Consequently, manufacturers must provide products that
signify both the analogic and the digital worlds. To
return to the example of cars, Ford was too far ahead
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81
of his time when he quipped to consumers that they
could have “any color of car they want, as long as
it’s black.” The purity of the digital model does not
account for cultural lag; in spite of the digital domination of the assembly line, the analogic still dominates aesthetic value. The lesson learned from this
is that in the practical arena of the commodity, precise replication is more desirable; however, in the
aesthetic realm of the commodity, the appearance
of difference is more desirable. Now auto manufacturers offer a digital infrastructure with an analogic
superstructure. All types of colors, designs, and features are offered in a car in order to give the impression of difference and retain the analogic value
of the unique precious object.
To this day, digital aesthetics is still on the economic margins. While it is dominant in appearance in the form of the mass media—now literally
the domain of the digital—the high end of value is
still found in the analogic. Here the anachronistic
economy of artisans reproduces itself as luxury
economy. This is the area where one-of-a-kind,
customized, and designer products still rule over
the cheap imitations and digital knock-offs. Custom-made jewelry, haute couture, and high art are
still the signifiers of privilege that underlie aesthetic value. They are perfection in a world of
counterfeits. The luxury market is closely related
to high culture, but as we shall see, this secular
field of sacred privilege is also being quietly plundered by the digital.
Digital Science
Even science has had to contend with the advancement of the digital paradigm. True, the elder sci-
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ences of physics and chemistry have held tenaciously to their analogic version of the cosmos, but
the youthful discipline of biology, in a sublime moment of oedipal revolution, has rejected the analogic
model of its elders as being useless to its pursuits.
Central to this discussion is the discovery of DNA.
In the 1940s, it was already known that heredity is
controlled by genes; that genes are located on chromosomes found in cell nuclei; and that genes are
produced by DNA. However, DNA was not really
understood in terms of its function and potential. It
was not until Crick and Watson were able to imagine the structure of DNA that its true potential was
realized. According to human genome scientist
Maynard Olson, Crick and Watson’s discovery was
meaningful because it occurred within the atmosphere of a formalized digital paradigm. They intuitively understood that DNA was not analogic (order from chaos), but instead digital (order from order). This type of modeling made possible the biological understanding of the production of life. Information replication in the body is analogous to
digital copying on a computer. Information is stored
as DNA (in a base 4 format, rather than in a base 2
format as used by computers), and precisely replicates itself when cells divide. Now that this piece of
information is understood, humans can intervene
in the once autonomous molecular systems of reproduction. This organic frontier now has no borders
because the basics of DNA become intelligible when
one analyzes them using the digital model of information storage, recognition, retrieval, and replication. Digital humans, animals, food, and medicine
are now in the marketplace.
Computer science and biology (hardware/software
and wetware) have reached a parallel maturity in
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83
the latter half of this century. That this correlation
is coincidence is unlikely, given their shared stake
in the development of the digital paradigm. Consequently, even science, like culture and economy, has
to suture the divide between the analogic and the
digital. Without question, when asking whether
natural, social, or economic processes are analogic
or digital, the answer at the dawn of the new millennium is: they are both.
Digital Culture
If Henry Ford is the avatar of a digital economy, then
his contemporary Marcel Duchamp is the avatar of
digital culture. With his readymade series, Duchamp
struck a mighty blow against the value system of
the analogic. Duchamp took manufactured objects,
signed and dated them, and placed them in a highculture context. Duchamp’s argument was that any
given object has no essential value and that the
semiotic network in which an object is placed defines its meaning, and hence, its value. If a bottle
rack is in a hardware store or next to a sink in a
kitchen, its value is defined by its function and its
appearance is mundane; however, when it is placed
on a pedestal in the legitimizing space of a gallery
or museum (where the readymades reside to this
day) and when it carries the signature of a legitimized artist, each object becomes a nonfunctional
object d’art, and therefore an object of high value.
Like Ford, Duchamp was too far ahead of his time.
His critique was not widely accepted in a period
obsessed with the romantic notions of the artist,
when each artwork produced by the elite few and
accepted by tastemakers of the time was viewed as
a unique testament to artistic genius. No great work
of art could be replicated by man or machine.
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Half a century later various publics were ready to
hear what Duchamp had tried to say early in the
century. Andy Warhol was emblematic of the many
artists, musicians, and writers who reintroduced the
idea of the digital to a now-eager audience. Warhol
discovered that all the people of digital culture really wanted was more of the same. No more unique
objects—they wanted the familiar ones that were
forever replicated around them. They wanted endless flows of Brillo boxes and serial prints of
Campbell’s soup cans produced at Warhol’s studio,
known as The Factory. The counterfeit was no
longer the counterfeit if it met the expectation of
sameness. Warhol subverted the modern notion of
art, and was loved for it, not just by an unsophisticated public, but also by a cultural elite who saw
his work as unique in making a “new” gesture by
destroying the original and reducing art objects to
the manufacturing (duplication) principle of
equivalence. But Warhol did not stop there; he performed digitality as the first cyborg artist. He was a
machine, no different from his constant companion the tape recorder. He was only replicating what
he saw around him; he took in the images of culture and spit them out again.
Theater, of course, has its visionary too. Karl Kraus
brought the digital model of theater to the attention of the public. He understood that the implosion of fiction and nonfiction into hyperreality
could be used for purposes other than perpetuating
dominant ideology. He also understood plagiarism
as a method for cultural production. These notions
came together in Kraus’s critique of the European
war machine in The Last Days of Mankind. Unfortunately, he was unable to conceive of a way to stage
the work. He could not think of a way to release it
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85
from hyperreality and loop it back into the physical world. Part of the problem was that the work
relied too heavily on narrative structure, but most
of the problem was that no looping mechanism had
been constructed yet. To this day the construction
of this loop is an ongoing and increasingly urgent
process, given pancapital’s rapid deployment of the
digital for its own perpetuation and profit.
Part II
Recombinant Theater
The complex division of labor in late capital is organized around the principle of specialization. As
long as a segment is useful, it will increase in complexity until a critical mass is reached: then the
segment will divide and separate, creating a new
area of specialization. During this process, members of a given segment develop numerous models and applications that act as subdividers within
an area. Most of the people in these subareas consider themselves different from others within the
specialization, much as members of the specialization perceive of themselves as inherently different from other specialized segments. The consequence of this situation is that a profound alienation emerges due to competition for resources
among and within specializations, along with an
inability to communicate effectively with one another due to lexical differences. Segments (and
particularly subsegments) become so specialized
that they sink into absurdity. How many times
have we heard scholars, engineers, scientists, etc.,
say with pride that there are only a few people in
the world who can understand what they do? This
situation is an embarrassment that not only
breeds alienation within specializations, but also
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banishes interested nonspecialists (publics) from
the stores of knowledge. To be sure, each segment and subsegment has developed some useful element to the same extent that each has serious difficulties. There is no paradigm, model,
or application that is not in some kind of critical
trouble.
Happily, this crisis has been recognized over the
past few decades, but little seems to have been
done about it. The division machine has been
turned on, and there seems to be no off switch.
The most common response to the problem in
the fine arts and humanities, both in the university and in the culture industry, is a call for
interdisciplinarity. For these institutions, this call
is a very poor joke. Disturbing the Enlightenment
tradition of managing knowledge through specialization would be disruptive to the entire politics, economy, and spatial-temporal relations of
these institutions. Second, the digital methods
needed to establish interdisciplinary practices are
not completely accepted. Cultural education and
production are both analogic institutions that reward the individual “genius” who is able to conjure unique and original moments of complex
order, and these institutions reject, if not punish, those who engage with methodologies of the
copy and with the celebration of the counterfeit. While this topic is sufficient material for a
book, suffice it to say that strategies and tactics
for unifying divisions among cultural practices
will not come from the university or cultural industry centers; rather, they will emerge from the
minor sectors and nomadic vectors that place
themselves in the anarchistic and liminal zones
of digital culture.
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87
The Theater of Everyday Life
For the past decade, Critical Art Ensemble has repeatedly suggested that recombinant theater consists
of interwoven performative environments through
which participants may flow. One of these foundational environments is the theater of everyday life,
which includes street theater and (for lack of a better term) what Alan Kaprow called “happenings.”
When using the term street theater, CAE has a very
particular meaning in mind. We do not include the
tradition of political theater that presents predetermined narratives “for the people.” This type of
presentation is merely traditional stage theater performed outdoors that has more ideological flotsam
than a Broadway play. Such performances simply
import spectacle and passivity into so-called public space. What CAE does consider street theater
are those performances that invent ephemeral, autonomous situations from which temporary public
relationships emerge that can make possible critical dialogue on a given issue. Traditional examples
of this type of activity come from the Living Theater, the Theater of the Oppressed, Guerrilla Art
Action Group, Rebel Chicano Art Front, and the
Situationists.
Clearly, happenings fit into this model as well. In
terms of intention, the differences are subtle. Perhaps the most obvious difference, albeit superficial,
is that happenings ally themselves with art discourse, while street theater allies itself with theater discourse. The other difference is that while
street theater was not recuperated in the west—
just ignored—happenings were reinvented to better serve the culture market. The art world defanged
them by turning happenings into performances and
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environments into installations. Every politically
useful characteristic and experimental motivation that happenings had were eliminated in favor of recentering the artist/performer, reconstituting a hushed silence from a passive audience,
and reviving predetermined narrative trajectories. This list is a collection of the very characteristics that recombinant theater leaves behind;
at the same time, recombinant theater attempts
to include compelling anti-authoritarian cultural
elements from other models of performative exploration.
Participation, process, pedagogy, and experimentation are the key components for further recombination that come from the theater of everyday
life. Models of cultural participation are the type
of application of digital aesthetics and organization that best serve resistant practice. Recombinant theater begins by eliminating the privileged
position of the director, auteur, genius, or any
other reductive, privatizing category. It undermines that analogic moment in which unique,
complex order, manifesting in human form, separates itself from the chaotic rabble, and one voice
speaks for the “betterment” of all. At that same
moment, through capital’s production of repressive social space, the chaotic rabble is digitized
into audience form—a homogenized unit. In this
process, subjects are fragmented and only a single
line of desire is allowed expression—that line of
degraded pleasure, that passive line of sight, that
makes an individual a “normalized” audience
member. This singular dimension of subjectivity is replicated in all the individuals who constitute the social constellation, and thus becomes
the dominant trait of the whole and the part.
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89
On the other hand, within the relatively
horizontalized space of recombinant theater, individuals are reassembled into an analogic form.
Multiple lines of desire as well as numerous forms
of social interaction can find expression. Under
these conditions, a loose-knit ephemeral public can
emerge. An actual construction of a public (temporary though it may be) through an open field of
performative practice makes possible a productive
pedagogy not found in the unilateral didacticism
of reactive or reactionary politicized art. In this way,
a participatory process can emerge out of both rational social interactions and nonrational libidinal
trafficking that creates skepticism in an individual
about the taken-for-grantedness of the social codes
of a given situation. While the instigators of this
process do have an empowered position because
they choose the topic and launch the event, this
discrepancy in power between performer and audience dissolves when the two come in contact, and
thus the power functions in a generative manner
rather than as one of domination. When the process functions properly, the instigators of the event
immediately fall into a mode of deterritorialization,
and the process drifts into a multiplicity of unknown
directions. No real intentionality exists, since the
interaction is process-oriented and thereby subject
to many unforseeable causalities and accidents.
Only aesthetic products can be fully intentionalized
and their quality controlled.
That is why this model remains permanently experimental. The method itself may not be experimental, but its application is. This type of performance is risky because the outcome is always unknown. Like all experiments, this one can fail, and
fail in the worst sense. While failure from audience
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indifference to one’s gestures is always possible,
experimental performance can decline into a worstcase scenario: a raving reinforcement of authoritarian culture. Once a discourse begins within a
differentiated public (the foundation of
interdisciplinarity in any practical sense), there is
no way to be sure that the internalized ideology of
dominant culture or other unfortunate conditioning won’t effectively assert themselves. CAE knows
by experience that they often do; however, the possibility of an emergent discourse of liberation, followed (one hopes) by the transformation of a public into a coalition, will never happen without open
dialogue and minimal expression management.
These are risks that must be taken.
Given such praise for the theater of everyday life,
the reader must be wondering, why fix what isn’t
broken? While this model does work well for
liberationist purposes, it has two tremendous shortcomings: the first is that it cannot bear the burden
of a complex conceptual structure. As long as the
idea the performer wants to bring to the audience
is simple and a part of participant members’ life experience, the model works well. For example, CAE
carried out a guerrilla performance in Sheffield, UK,
in the hope of revealing some of the hidden structures of domination in everyday life. CAE chose a
harmless action that took place in a location where
the typical activities of the local population would
not be disturbed. The activity chosen was to give
away beer and cigarettes. The location selected for
the action was a pedestrian mall and transportation artery. Here CAE attempted to inject the expressive possibilities of open exchange found in a
public bar into a space that was reserved exclusively
for consumption. Although the area was allegedly
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91
a public space, no conversation, conviviality, or
coming together of diverse groups (or any other
characteristic of bourgeois utopian public space) occurred there. Once this managed space was broken
by the alien gesture of offering free beer, these very
same elements of utopian public space immediately
emerged. However, so did other restrictive structures of everyday life. For example, the environment that was created demonstrated male privilege.
Far fewer women participated, and most of those
who entered the environment stood at the periphery and observed the activity from the margins. This
social constellation stood out as the perfect representation of the gender hierarchy found in
pangendered social space. These and other elements
of expression management in the performative
realm became immediately visible, particularly for
those in the center of the event. The most interesting reaction from the male participants was complete astonishment at the action. The whole context—a moment of meeting new people, having
conversations, getting drunk while waiting for the
tram, getting free commodities, and so on—seemed
so unbelievable that as one man put it, “It’s a dream
come true.” Years of socialization had made it seem
impossible that members of the public could appropriate the space of the commodity. In this case,
prior to the event, reterritorialization of the space
of the commodity through public process could only
be imagined in the confines of a personal, interior,
dreamspace.
These are very basic observations relevant to understanding and to producing social space, but a
performance such as this one could not offer even
a superficial critique of how this situation had come
to pass, or explain the mechanisms through which
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the ideology of social space had been internalized.
In spite of the fact that the performative model
worked very well in terms of process, participation,
immediacy, and pedagogy, the parameters of discourse were limited, to say the least.
A second major problem with this model lies in its
pedagogy. The theater of everyday life is limited to everyday life. Key issues in liberationist practice that
are beyond local and immediate parameters do not
register in this model. Indeed, this is a problem for
activists as well as for artists. As liberationist practice faces increasingly global or specialized issues,
or requires an international constituency for locally
based issues, the usefulness of the theater of everyday life begins to wane. For the theater of everyday
life to function pedagogically, the participants involved must have direct experience with a given
issue. For example, the spatial construction of gender inequality illustrated by the example above is
something everyone experiences, but does not necessarily recognize. Participation in the theater of
everyday life can make the transparent codes of gender separation opaque and impossible to miss. Once
these codes are perceived, a critical understanding
quickly follows through dialogue. That is why this
model of performance was used so effectively in developing notions of agency and class position in
localized third-world colonial struggles.
Unfortunately, many current issues that have drawn
the attention of liberationist cultural forces are not
so localized, basic, and available. For example, the
revolution in biotechnology has brought about
numerous social problems—most notably, the resurrection of eugenics. While it has been
reconfigured to better fit the current market mecha-
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93
nisms, and although it avoids calling attention to
itself as overt social policy, today’s eugenics is every bit as pernicious and destructive as the first wave
that marked the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The problem is that this time, eugenics is an
invisible social dynamic that is quietly emerging
out of the pancapitalist institutions of the economy
of excess and the nuclear family. How can a pedagogical theatrical environment be constructed in
this case? Reproductive technology, and the current direction that molecular biology and medicine
(both utopian and oppressive) are taking, are far
too removed from everyday life because these practices are still limited in their deployment and the
knowledge is so specialized. The idea of molecular
invasion and colonization still seems like a sciencefiction scenario. On the other hand, the area of
the biotech revolution that people seem to find
most troubling is genetically modified food production, because here there is a direct experience (anxiety) about the disruption of a daily ritual of eating.
Along this same line of solving the problem of the
absence of experience is the issue of constructing
international constituencies around localized social
problems. For example, there is an international
movement for the liberation of Mumia Abu Jamal.
Once again, supporters are employing the traditional civil rights strategy of using outsider power
vectors to shame a localized offender into correcting an injustice. As with the civil rights movement
of the 1950s and early 1960s, people with no experiential connection to the situation must be convinced to identify with it. The perceptions and relationships of the support contingents are completely mediated. Perceptions of race relations, police/civilian relationships, prison issues, etc., vary
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Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance
dramatically from culture to culture and from subculture to subculture. The consistent local elements
of race relations, police, and prisons do not manifest in the same manner, because the outrage of one
locality around this set of relationships is not necessarily the experience of another. Consequently,
one local group cannot depend on intersubjective
experience as a means to acquire political support
for their cause. Globalization has created a new
theater that bursts the boundaries of the theater
of everyday life. We now have a theater of activism that has emerged out of the necessity of taking material life struggles into hyperreality. Activists are now more than just organizers, negotiators, objectors, and policy manufacturers; they are
also inventors of and actors in fully mediated
worlds, and are thereby forced into the treachery
of representation.
Because of this situation, liberationist performers
now must find a way to splice greater conceptual
complexity and a more broadly based pedagogy into
their performative models. CAE would like to suggest that one potential solution is to use elements
from the emerging theater of information and its
attendant technologies. Mechanisms that can deliver specialized information in a fast, aestheticized
manner have become increasingly necessary and
more useful than ever.
The Theater of Information
The tendency to immediately jump into what is considered the cutting edge of information and communication technology (ICT) is typical for those
grounded in a variety of disciplines interested in
experimentation within this genre. In the case of
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95
the theater in particular, the tendency is to leap to
the construction of a virtual theater. ICT has
promised that a fully interactive, living, virtual
theater is just around the corner if we just stay
on-line. As yet, CAE knows of no virtual theater
that has a multifaceted, interactive social dimension, and certainly nothing with any resistant potential; rather, the virtual theater available seems
to reinforce the worst elements of the
disembodiment of the technocratic class for the
sake of greater instrumentality.
At present, virtual theater works on two fronts. The
first is the use of ICT as a new display technology
for older media that intersect performance practices—for example, streaming prerecorded video
over the Net. Once again the old discourse of
democratic TV is back, only with the added kicker
that the problem of distribution (which undermined the video utopia of the 1970s) is solved.
CAE does not want to take up space explaining
why the Net is a poor broadcast technology; however, a broadcast technology with millions of channels tends to dilute the viewer base, and capitalsaturated agencies will, as always, be able attract
viewers more effectively than those that are impoverished. (This is one of the ways that capital
replicates its class system in the allegedly neutral
zone of virtual space.)
The second front is virtual theater proper, which
tends to manifest in one of two ways. The first manifestation is the virtual community. Whether a textbased or a graphic user interface is used, these simulations of sociability are the most profound testament to the nightmare of disembodiment. Here
capital realizes its Cartesian dreams of body elimina-
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Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance
tion by creating an interface that appeals solely
to the mind. Not only is the body itself eliminated
from the social equation, but any sharing of space
by bodies is eliminated. Deleuze and Guattari have
persuasively argued that the matrix of authority is
centered on the body. The two most regulated elements of the social world, are, first, what can
enter and leave the body, and second, what a body
may be in proximity to and/or intermingle with.
In the case of virtual theater, nothing is going in
or out of the body, nor is it sharing space with
anyone or anything other than those objects that
produce a space designed purely for production and
consumption. In other words, those involved in
the virtual theater are nothing more than neutralized subjects incapable of disrupting the matrix of authority and thus establishing an autonomous subjectivity. For any type of resistant activity, this variety of virtual theater is useless, despite its democratic claims to provide creative
interactivity. Acting in a virtual community is the
very definition of what Debord called “enriched
privation.”
The second manifestation of virtual theater is the
netcast—using live video streaming of a local theatrical event that is linked to virtual text-communication software such as an Internet Relay
Chat. This method invites remote viewing and
multi-user commentary. Although this type of
technological interface is an improvement over
the virtual community of the avatar, it is still an
unfortunate hypermediated version of social activity. The problems here are simple, and are related to the problems of broadcasting already mentioned. All actions and images are reduced to the
same tiny scale, and most people are not accus-
Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance
97
tomed to speaking conversationally in writing.
Due to the intense level of technological mediation, these productions are awkward to the extent that being a virtual audience member is certainly a step down from actually attending the
event. The hope here (and whether it can be realized in a satisfactory manner remains to be seen)
is to free audience members from the limitations
of locality, yet it is difficult to know if this
liberational characteristic is worth all that must
be sacrificed in terms of immediate experience and
social interaction.
Another theatrical use for this technology is less
grand in its ambitions, but it is functional. ICT
can virtually extend the spatial codings and parameters of the theater space and allow for simulations that otherwise would not be possible. Here
the technology is used as a unidirectional
performative component rather than as an interactive one. Since the audience members do not
have to be at terminals and instead interact only
in real space, the use of scale is no longer fixed,
because projections can be used. For example,
CAE did a performance at Rutgers University to
call attention to sperm and egg donor recruitment
on university campuses for use in neo-eugenic
practices. Using SeeUCMe, CAE was able to provide the illusion that a reprotech company visiting Rutgers was actively recruiting a sperm donor
for a woman who was monitoring the process online from Florida. (In actuality, the performer was
in a back room in the building, but it read perfectly as a transborder process.) The effectiveness
of this technology was due to the looping back of
the virtual into real space, and a surrendering of
interactivity in favor of participation.
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Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance
For the most part, virtual theater lacks all the redeeming characteristics of theatrical practice,
whether they are resistant functions or just pleasurable social functions. The short answer to this
problem is simply to argue that the body is still the
key building block of theater, and that if performers are to drift into virtuality, they should find the
means to develop feedback loops between the electronic and the organic. However, CAE contends
that there is another important piece to this puzzle:
the jump from real space to virtual space is premature. The virtual has never been anything more
than corporate hype to convince consumers that
this time, the technological wish fulfillment machine will be a reality. Instead, performers should
consider ICT’s function as an information organizer.
For example, what makes video streaming interesting is not the broadcast potential, but its archival potential (the inverse manifestation of broadcast) to allow viewers fast and immediate access to
desired material (after all, the Net’s primary function is to be a massive, organized file cabinet). Further, ICT as an information organizer represents a
hardware/software combination that could help to
solve the conceptual problems raised in the last
section, provided that its interconnections with
organic bodies are maintained.
ICT is not going to provide community, democracy, expanded consciousness, nor interactive theater, nor will it fulfill any other grandiose utopian
wish. It will provide only very poor simulations of
these things because these complex systems are reduced to the singularity of information exchange.
ICT is really only good for one thing—information storage, retrieval, exchange, and display. Best
of all, it does these fast. However, this one thing is
Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance
99
enough to offer a means to deepen the pedagogical
dimension of resistant theatrical practice.
For example, CAE did a very large-scale event entitled Flesh Machine. During this event, CAE hoped
to reveal the eugenic substrata in reprotech. The
problem here is obvious—most audience members
have no experiential connection with reprotech,
so we could not use a method to tease out what
they already knew, but had yet to articulate. Nor
did the group like the idea of presenting a manual
for the incoming audience to study (CAE did write
a book on the subject that would function well in
this capacity, but it would not solve the problem of
there being no lived experience—critical texts have
very definite limits). As Paolo Friere has pointed
out, the “banking method” of education is of modest use in raising critical consciousness because it is
not grounded in the meaningful structures of everyday life. Somehow, the collective had to devise
a means to impart basic background information
on reprotech under performance conditions so that
information could lend support to an emerging experiential process. To make matters more difficult,
the two had to fit together somewhat seamlessly.
CAE’s answer was to use computers to deliver and
seductively display the information. The collective
created a CD-ROM with information on medical
procedures, a diary of a couple going through invitro fertilization, an electronic children’s book, and
so on. The heart of the electronic presentation was
an actual genetic screening test. A code was written for the test that allowed the computer to assess
a participant’s answers, and reward he/r with a certificate of genetic merit or reject he/r with a curt
notice of insufficient genetic quality. When one
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takes the test, it becomes abundantly clear that it
is not just a medical document. It also notes one’s
aesthetic traits (such as skin color and quality) and
searches for talents and abilities (intelligence, coordination, creativity, etc). Through this experience, many participants could comprehend very
quickly and clearly the structure of genetic stratification and the markers of value latent in the test.
Consequently, the audience learned how easily the
flesh is commodified. This process was then reinforced by allowing those who passed the test to proceed in the event by having their blood taken for
DNA extraction and amplification, and by having
a cell sample cryopreserved. During the process, the
participants interacted not only with the performers, but also with computer technicians, doctors,
nurses, lab technicians, and scientists. For that period, they were immersed in the hyperreality of the
flesh machine in a way that offered them an active
experience of new eugenics and its tremendously
complex cultural context.
To be sure, this experiment in recombinant theater was conducted under the best of all possible
conditions. Both the issue under examination and
the audience for this work lent themselves to a
functional use of the theater of information. The
participants were overwhelmingly young and
middle class and (as to be expected) computer literate. This computer literacy translates perfectly
into bioliteracy, since biotech is just another form
of infomatics/cybernetics. Consequently, this audience was primed to consume this information
with ease.
In answer to the issue of producing work that has
limited audience potential, CAE designed a sim-
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101
pler action that could reach a broader audience.
The group created the Society for Reproductive
Anachronisms (SRA). This performative counterfeit consisted of a group of activists that spoke to
people about the dangers of medical intervention
in the reproductive process. In the tradition of activist groups, the public interface was designed
around an information table. The SRA had the
usual pamphlets and flyers, but it also offered computerized information. This included information
on the positive aspects of genetic anomalies, reproductive fashion tips (such as the use of codpieces
to raise sperm count), herbal remedies for reproductive problems, a genetic screening test (in which
a participant was rewarded for failing), and much
more. The main goal here was to produce an action that could be realized under almost any social
condition. Production costs were extremely low, so
any group or institution could sponsor the project.
If participants had no computer skills, someone was
at the table to help them. With a very simple gesture, a lot of complex information could be conveyed in an entertaining and inexpensive manner.
While this piece was dialogic and the scripts were
self-generated (as with Flesh Machine), this project
did lack the broad variety of voices that helped
make Flesh Machine so meaningful.
Research into this recombinant type of theater is
only just beginning. Many more experiments will
have to be conducted and computer literacy will
have to increase before this type can fully and successfully be deployed in manifold situations.
Whether computer literacy will grow beyond the
classes of the technocracy is unknown, so it’s possible that this form of recombinant theater will not
be useful in more challenging situations. However,
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where and when it does work, it contributes to a
process in which social segments share space in a
generative way, spheres of knowledge intersect, and
new varieties of political connectedness emerge.
The thinking and the doing do not end at the close
of the event, but continue into everyday life, thus
creating a never-ending theater of becoming.
page 104 has an image
Little Brother
IAA
6
Contestational Robotics
Critical Art Ensemble & The Institute for Applied Autonomy
Part I
Since the modern notion of public space has been increasingly recognized as a bourgeois fantasy that was
dead on arrival at its inception in the 19th century, an urgent need has emerged for continuous
development of tactics to reestablish a means of
expression and a space of temporary autonomy
within the realm of the social. This problem has
worsened in the latter half of the 20th century since
new electronic media have advanced surveillance
capabilities, which in turn are supported by stronger and increasingly pervasive police mechanisms
that now function in both presence and absence.
Indeed, the need to appropriate social space has
decreased with the rise of nomadic power vectors
and with the disappearance of borders in regard to
This article was originally published in README: ASCII Culture and
the Revenge of Knowledge (New York: Autonomedia, 1999).
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Contestational Robotics
multinational corporate political and economic
policy construction; however, on the micro-level
of everyday life activity, and within the parameters of physical locality, spatial appropriations and
the disruption of mechanisms for extreme expression management still have value. Each of us, at
one point or another, and to varying degrees, has
had to face the constraints of specific social spaces
that are so repressive that any act beyond those of
service to normative comportment, the commodity, or any other component of the status quo is
strictly prohibited. Such situations are most common at the monuments to capital that dot the urban landscape, but they can also be witnessed in
spectacular moments when extreme repression
shines through the screenal mediator as an alibi
for democracy and freedom. The finest example
to date in the U.S. was the 1996 presidential election. A protest area was constructed at the Republican National Convention, where protesters
could sign up for fifteen-minute intervals during
which they were permitted to speak openly. This
political joke played on naive activists had the
paradoxical effect of turning the protesters into
street corner kooks screaming from their soapbox
about issues with no history or context, while at
the same time reinforcing the illusion that there
is free speech in the public sphere. Certainly, for
anyone who was paying attention enough to see
through the thin glaze of capital’s “open society,”
this ritualized discontent was the funeral for all
the myths of citizenry, public space, or open discourse. To speak of censorship in this situation
(or in the many others that could be cited by any
reader) is deeply foolish, when there was no free
speech or open discourse to begin with. What is
really being referred to when the charge of cen-
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107
sorship is made is an increase in expression management and spatial fortification that surpasses the
everyday life expectation of repression. Censorship and self-censorship (internalized censorship)
is our environment of locality, and it is within this
realm that contestational robots can perform a useful service.
The Function of Robots
While robots are generally multifunctional and useful
for a broad variety of duties such as rote tasks, highprecision activities, telepresent operations, data collection, and so on, one function above all other is of
greatest interest to the contestational roboticist. That
function is the ability of robots to insinuate themselves into situations that are mortally dangerous or
otherwise hazardous to humans. Take, for example,
three robots developed at Carnegie Mellon University. The first is a robot that can be affixed to pipes
with asbestos insulation; it will inch its way down
the pipe, cutting away the asbestos and safely collecting the remains at the same time. For a robot,
this one is relatively inexpensive to produce, and
could reduce the costs of removing extremely carcinogenic materials. The second is a robot designed
in case of a nuclear accident. This robot has the capability of cutting into a nuclear containment tank
of a power plant and testing for the degree of core
corruption and area contamination. Once again, this
method is certainly preferable to having a person
suit up in protective gear and doing the inspection
he/rself. Finally, an autonomous military vehicle is
under development. The reasons for the development of this vehicle are not publicly discussed, so
let’s just imagine for a moment what they might be.
What could an autonomous military vehicle be used
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Contestational Robotics
for? Let’s make the fair and reasonable assumption
that it has direct military application as a tactical
vehicle (it is a humvee after all). It could have scouting capabilities; since the vision engines of this vehicle are very advanced this possibility seems likely.
At present, the vehicle has no weapons or weapon
mounts. Of course, such an oversight could be easily
remedied. If the vehicle was used as an assault vehicle it would still follow the model set by the prior
two robots. In other words, it could go into a situation unfit for humans and take action in response to
that environment. However, one element distinguishes the potential assault vehicle from the other
two robots. While the other two are primarily designed for a physical function, the latter has a social
function—the militarization of space by an intelligent agent. Of modest fortune is the fact that this
model can be inverted. Militarized social space can
be appropriated by robots, and alternative expressions could be insinuated into the space by robotic
simulations of human actions. While autonomous
robotic action in contestational conditions is beyond
the reach of the amateur roboticist, basic telepresent
action may not be.
The Space of Contestational Robots
Like the physical dangers of being irradiated or breathing asbestos, there are dangers in specific social
spaces which are too great to allow those of
contestational consciousness and subversive intent
to enter. Even the tiniest voice of disruption is met
by silencing mechanisms that can range from ejection from the space to arrest and/or violence. For
example, being in or around the grand majority of
governmental spaces and displaying any form of behavior outside the narrow parameters designated for
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109
those spaces will bring a swift response from authorities. Think back to the example of the convention
protest space. Using the designated protest area was
the only possibility, as no protest permits (an oxymoron) were being issued. Those who attempted to
challenge this extensively managed territory were
promptly told to leave or face arrest. These are the
hazardous conditions under which robotic objectors
could be useful; they would allow agents of contestation to enter their discourse into public record,
while keeping the agent at a safe distance from the
disturbance. (The remotes can work at distances up
to ninety meters; however, the robot has to be kept
within the operator’s line of sight.)
Performative Possibilities
What could a robotic objector do in these spaces? We
believe that it could simulate many of the possibilities for human action within fortified domains.
For example:
Robotic Graffiti Writers. These robots are basically a
combination of a remote control toy car linked with
airbrushes and some simple chip technology. When
running smoothly, this robot can lay down slogans
(much like a mobile
dot matrix printer) at
speeds of 15 mph. (See
part two.)
Robotic Pamphleteers.
Simply distributing information in many
spaces (such as malls,
airports, etc.) can get a
person arrested. These
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Contestational Robotics
are the spaces where a robotic delivery system could
come in handy—especially if deployed in flocks.
Remember, people love cute robots (anthropomorphic, round-eyed japanamation cuteness is a recommended aesthetic for this variety of robot), and
are more likely to take literature from a robot than
from most humans. At the same time, the excessively cute aesthetic can lead to robotnapping.
Noise Robots. These are very cheap to make from
existing parts and are particularly recommended for
indoor situations. By just adding a canned foghorn
or siren to a remote toy car, one can create a noise
bomb that can disrupt just about any type of smallto medium-scale proceeding into which it can be
insinuated.
These are but a few ideas of how relatively simple technologies could be used for micro-level disturbances.
Given the subversive imagination of tactical media practitioners around the world, it’s easy to believe that better ideas and more efficient ways of
creating such robots will soon be on the table. However, it also has to be kept in mind that robotic
objectors are of greater value as spectacle than they
are as militarized resistance. After all, they are only
toybots. Yet these objects of play can demonstrate
what public space could be, and that there are other
potentials in any given area beyond the authoritarian realities that secured space imposes on those
within it.
Costs
There is a triple cost to this type of robotic practice.
First, it does require a modest amount of electrical
engineering knowledge, and as we all know, edu-
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111
cation costs money. Second, it requires access to
basic tools, but access to a machine shop would be
better. Third is the cost of hardware. Robots are
expensive, and there is no getting around it. In the
field of robotics proper, it is barely possible to build
a toy for less than 10,000 USD. We have brought
the cost down to between 100 and 1,000 USD, but
this could add up very quickly for a garage tinkerer
or for underfunded tactical media practitioners. It
seems safe to assume that a robot will be used more
than once in most cases, but even so, robotic objectors are outside the parameters for a common,
low-cost, tactical weapon. To be sure, this research
is in its experimental stages.
Security
In spite of the fact that contestational robotics is a
completely civil action and poses no danger to anyone, do not expect authority to share this belief.
First, when placed in a militarized area (i.e., any
space in which deep capital is being protected),
robots are assumed to be of military origin. Given
this association, it is likely that the robotic objector will be perceived as a weapon, and treated accordingly. In conjunction, the builder of the robot
is very likely to be treated as military personnel.
Even if the robot is captured and found to be only
a toy, the builder of the robot will be subject to
arrest and serious jail time, because the military/
police were deployed against a militarized menace.
The charges that an activist may face vary in number and wording from state to state and from country to country, but they all have one common function. They give police discretionary arrest privileges.
Even though no violent crime is committed, those
associated with the state’s perception of attempted
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Contestational Robotics
violence can be arrested as if a violent crime had
been committed. Laws against “crimes,” such as
creating a false public emergency, are regularly
used in such situations by authoritarian agencies.
These laws are designed specifically to make it
easier to arrest political dissidents and to stifle determined attempts at open discourse. They are also
a way of re-presenting ethical political protest as
terrorist action, and are one of the state’s best
sleight-of-hand tricks. This situation is very much
the same as when hackers are called terrorists, even
though their only crime is trespassing in an electronic environment where there is no one to terrorize. Given this extreme and unjust reaction, be
sure to purchase supplies with cash, wear gloves
when building robots, use only common parts and/
or materials, remove serial numbers when necessary, and do not routinely frequent any supplier.
Be careful: capital gets very reactionary when you
hack its technology.
A Note on the Relationship
of Amateurism to Contestational Robotics
The amateur has been a scorned figure in post-Enlightenment knowledge management. Specialists
and experts are the ones who get the praise. In
this situation, each knowledge specialist hides in
h/er own tower, making occasional encroachments
on neighboring territories. In turn, these shortrange migrations are rebuked as amateur attempts
to marshal information resources that trespassers
cannot understand. This attitude is not totally
without merit. Knowledge specializations are very
complex and do require years of study to master.
At the same time, dismissing the amateur out of
hand can have a detrimental impact on the prac-
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113
tical aspects of applying a specialization, whether
in the material or policy arenas.
In relation to robotics, most of us aren’t mechanical science experts, or software or electrical engineers, but we do have the advantages of being naive visionaries with collective political experience,
the desire to share skills and resources, and the
collective ability to open any desired field of
knowledge. Home tinkering is of necessity in robotics and biotechnology to the same degree we
have seen it used successfully in information and
communications technology (everything from
simple shareware to ascii culture to hardware recycling). New versions of expertise must be constructed. Without tinkerers using models of anarchist epistemology, contestational robotics will not
come to be.
Part II
How to Build a Robotic Graffiti Writer
This manual is the first in a series of robotic objector
projects for the home roboticist/techno-anarchist.
This design combines the integrated perception and
autonomous navigation skills of the human dissident with the efficiency and compact size of a robot specifically adapted to the goals and terrain of
street actions. The
basic design calls for
a roughly shoe-boxsized trailer to be
drawn by a remotecontrolled vehicle.
The trailer consists
of an array of five
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Contestational Robotics
spray paint units that are controlled by a central processor. The vehicle is navigated into the target area by
its human operator. At the appropriate time a switch
on the controller is thrown, signaling the start of the
“action.” As the vehicle rolls along the ground, the
row of spray cans prints a text message in much the
same way that a dot-matrix printer would. For example
the word CAPITALIST would be written as:
***
* *
***
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*** *** * * *** * * *** **
*
*
* * *
** *
* *
* * ** * * *
*
** **
* * *
* * *
** *
* *
*** *
*** *** * * *** * *
Depending on the nature of the action, the vehicle
can either be navigated to a secluded “safe-zone”
or considered a worthy sacrifice in the name of robotic objection.
The skills needed to build this robot do not require an
engineering degree, although they do require a reasonable amount of experience in building circuits,
programming micro-controllers (Basic STAMP),
and shop skills/metalworking; the project might best
be accomplished by a small group of individuals.
Materials
REMOTE CONTROL CAR. This will be by far the
most costly aspect of this project. When coupled
with the radio controller and essentials such as a
battery charger, the vehicle represents roughly a $500
investment. What makes this car exceptional is that
it needs to be capable of pulling 3-4 kilograms of
additional weight and still maintain a top speed of
10-15 mph. This generally means a scaled-down version of a “Monster Truck” i.e., multiple engines, etc.
Contestational Robotics
115
Consult your local RC enthusiast—they love these
sort of specialty problems. It also must be able to
receive three channels instead of the usual two.
RADIO CONTROLLER. Any three-channel controller will do.
2 WHEELS. Light-weight street wheels from an RC
catalog.
5 INTERMITTENT SOLENOIDS. The surplus variety will be more than adequate here. Something in
the neighborhood of 24v (.25 - .3 amp) that can
hold itself shut against fairly vigorous tugging.
BATTERIES. One to power the solenoids (probably
24v) and one to power the circuitry (9v).
5 SPRAY CANS. The 3 oz miniature variety is best
for reasons of weight and size. However, the industrial paint that road workers use could be used
if the weight is less of a problem. Remember to
choose a color that complements the terrain.
MICRO-CONTROLLER. Almost any standard chip
(i.e., BASIC stamp) will suffice as long as it has
at least two inputs and five outputs.
LED/OPTO-TRANSISTOR. For use as an encoder.
TRANSISTORS, RESISTORS, CAPACITORS,
and WIRE. Specific values cannot be given here,
as there are too many variables to worry about.
RAW MATERIALS. 1/32" aluminum or plastic
sheet, lightweight plastic or wood square stock (1/
4" by 1/4").
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Contestational Robotics
Construction
There are too many variables at work here to describe
the construction or components in extreme detail.
Availability of surplus goods and access to means
of production will vary from group to group.
As with any robotics project, the strategy is to work
on individual parts AND the overall product AT
THE SAME TIME. One needs to be building
working sub-systems, while continually evaluating them to ensure that they will work together.
The project is divided into four subsystems.
1) Micro-controller (+software)
2) encoder
3) structure of trailer
4) Solenoid–spray-can system
The Micro-Controller
A plethora of micro-controllers exist that are easy
to learn to use. Any of the more popular packages that clutter the pages of hobbyist magazines
will suffice as long as they meet the requirements
of having at least two inputs and five outputs.
The first input pin is used for the signal that
comes from the controller and tells the microprocessor to start performing its task, i.e., print
the text. The second input pin is for the encoder that attaches to one of the wheels or axles. The encoder tells the processor how fast the
vehicle is moving in terms of “clicks” (see encoder section). Each “click,” or 1/4 turn of the
wheels, will mean that one column of a letter is
to be printed. This allows the processor to adjust the space of the letters according to how fast
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117
the car is moving. The five output pins are all
used for controlling the solenoids that activate
the spray cans.
The Text
As mentioned earlier, the text is printed as if by a
dot-matrix printer. Each individual letter is
printed with a 5x3 grid of dots and therefore requires a minimum of 15 bits to be rendered. The
most cost-effective method of storing this data
in terms of RAM would be to use 16-bit blocks
(type SHORT) for each letter in your array and
simply ignore the last bit. However, if you have
the RAM, it may be more elegant to use one byte
for each column (three columns per letter). This
abstracts things a bit, making it easier to print
simple graphics instead of text or to use the extra bits in each column as a kind of control character. For instance, you could have a bit that
controls how long the can sprays, making it possible to have dots and dashes.
Depending on how much RAM the micro-controller has, you could build a function into the chip
that translates the text into a binary stream using a lookup
table—for instance,
111111010011100 for the letter P, as in the example earlier. Such a table would use only around
52 bytes or so (2 bytes per letter times 26 letters). Or translation could be done offline and
the stream hard-coded into the chip at programming time.
The following is some pseudo-code that should give
a fair idea of how the components interact with
each other.
118
Contestational Robotics
_____________________
Typedef COLUMN = a byte
pin1 = GO signal
pin2 = wheel encoder
pin3-7 = solenoids
COLUMN the_text_array[# of letters] =
convert_text(“THE MESSAGE TO PRINT”)
COLUMN col
while(1){
if(GO signal ON)
//If it gets the GO
signal, the loop
timer + 1
//must run 5 times
with the signal ON
if(GO signal OFF)
//before it will
GO. This prevents false signals
timer = 0
if(timer > 5){
for(i = 1 to # of letters){
for(j = 1 to 3){
//The
number of columns in a letter
col =
read_next_column(the_text_array)
paint_column(col)
//writes
the bits to pins 3 thru 7
wait (for encoder click)
}
all pins OFF
//
puts a space between letters
wait (for encoder click)
}
}
}
________________________
Signal from Controller (i.e., GO!)
The average remote control car uses a minimum
of two channels in order to be controlled by the
remote. That is, one channel controls forward
and backward motion, and the other controls
Contestational Robotics
119
left and right motion. It is very easy to add
channels by using standard parts from an RC
hobbyist catalog. In this case, we need one more
channel that will be used to trigger the textprinting function. The signal that comes out of
the receiver on the car is most likely going to
be PWM (Pulse Width Mod), in which case the
supplied code should be sufficient to direct the
signal straight into the micro-controller. Should
the signal happen to be analog, most micro-controllers have at least one pin that can receive
an analog signal.
Encoder
There’s no need to run out and buy a 600-degree
optical encoder for this. All we need is a standard LED and phototransistor pairing. They
tend to look like this:
__
__
|L| |P|
| |_| |
|_____|
There are two standard ways of implementing these as
an encoder. In one version, the principle works like
thus: When the LED light hits the phototransistor,
it is ON. When something is stuck in between
them, it is OFF. All we do is attach a pinwheel divided at 45-degree intervals to the axle of one of
the wheels and have it pass through the center of
the pairing, like this:
120
Contestational Robotics
Fig. 1.
___
\ | /|
\ | / |
__\|/__|
| /|\
| / | \
|/ |__\
pinwheel
|
|
| <- pinwheel
|
__ | __
|L|||P|
| |_| |
|_____|
This is where the “clicks,” described earlier, originate.
Each space in the pinwheel causes one click in the
phototransistor. The signal from the transistor is
then passed on to pin 2 of the micro-controller.
In another variation on the same theme, the LED/
phototransistor pair is pointed at a black-and-white
pinwheel (potentially the wheel hub). The light
from the LED reflects off the white parts and triggers the phototransistor, sending it into an ON
state. The light is absorbed by the black sections,
sending it into an OFF state.
Trailer Construction
Anything more than a cursory description would be
impossible here without the use of mechanical
drawings or photographs. The basic idea is that we
have a trailer chassis resting on two wheels. It is
connected to the rear of the vehicle via some type
of flexible joint. The chassis can be made out of a
sheet of lightweight plastic or aluminum with plastic or aluminum supports. The spray cans are secured, lying flat on the trailer between the wheels.
A slot or window runs the width of the trailer be-
Contestational Robotics
121
low the spray nozzles and perpendicular to the spray
cans (this is what they spray through). The solenoids are mounted on a shelf raised an inch or so
above the spray nozzles. This allows room for the
batteries and electronics to be stored underneath.
(See Fig. 2)
Solenoid–Spray-Can Mechanism
Mechanically speaking, this portion will be the most
difficult to construct and will require a lot of
kludging to get it right. What we’ve got is a row of
five spray-cans facing downward and another row
of five solenoids that must use their pulling motion
to push the buttons of the spray cans. This is probably most easily achieved by a simple system of
fixed-pivot linkages. The solenoids are arranged so
that they are facing (plungers toward) the spray
nozzles, and probably raised an inch or so above
the nozzle center. The linkages should be in the
form of the letter Z, with joints at the corners and
a fixed-pivot point somewhere in the Z diagonal.
The plungers of the solenoids should be attached
to the upper portion of the Z and the lower one
should touch the tip of the spray can.
Fig. 2
(Side View)
_______
|
|
| Sol.|=[———O-joint
_____|_____|__
|
___________ |
o-pivot
|
| |
|
_________
|Batteries| |
|
/
|
|
| | joint-O—— []=| spray |
|_________| |
\_________|
_____________|____________
____________
122
Contestational Robotics
The placement of the pivot point on the linkage determines how much leverage is placed on the
nozzle. This may take some tweaking to get enough
pressure to make it spray on command.
Conclusion
The intentions of this chapter are twofold. First, it
presents one concrete example of how a robotic
objector can be built to be useful to resistant forces.
Second, it should open up critical discussion of the
value, implications, and design of these tools. Several prototypes are already in the construction
phase of development and collective discourse can
only enhance the process.
page 124 has an image
SuperKidFighter
CDL
7
Children as Tactical Media Participants
Critical Art Ensemble & The CarbonDefenseLeague
Part I
This story is apocryphal, but the unspoken motto of
the Jesuits in regard to children’s education is said
to be, “Give them to me until they are twelve, and
they are mine for life.” This statement, coming as
it does from the Jesuits, conveys a cruel honesty:
western education is not about opening one’s horizons through expanding the possibilities of interpretation and encouraging the exploration of various simultaneous becomings. Quite the opposite:
education is about copying—it is digital reproduction in its most hideous form. Education (or for that
matter any interaction between child and authority) is a means to replicate specific semiotic regimes
within individuals that will direct them to become
a part of a digital aggregate. It also functions to block
any conduit that could allow the individual to flow
in directions other than those approved of by dominant culture. The apocryphal saying quoted above
126
Children as Tactical Media Participants
clearly implies that the goal of Jesuit education is
precisely to inscribe an immutable and irreversible
semiotic regime in individuals that will produce
fully committed Roman Catholics. The goal of
capital’s educational system is the same, only on a
larger scale; it must impose a semiotic regime that
produces new generations of workers/consumers.
Unfortunately, capital’s education apparatus does
not share the honesty of the Jesuits (making it all
the more despicable), because its true ends are hidden by false rhetoric and bureaucratic habit.
Education is not the only culprit. Wherever a child
turns, another institution is ready to do capital’s
digital social work. Children are coerced by the family, church, school, media, and even peer groups
into learning that which feeds capital’s ideological
ends. These institutional bunkers combine to create an inescapable spectacular environment that
envelops children and adults alike in a thicket of
capital’s semiotic barbed wire. Children have only
unspecified desire as a defensive potential against
the fate of imprisonment within the symbolic order. In view of the biotech revolution in the areas
of pharmacology and genetic engineering, unspecified desire may soon be a poor final defense. The
one glimmer of hope is that desire cannot be done
away with if the organism is to continue to function, so it can only be diluted and misdirected, but
never completely destroyed.
Any tools that could be used by children to cut
through capital’s thicket are withheld. Critical
thinking is not introduced to intellectually developed children; they must wait until they are adults
to be exposed to it in any radicalized form. What
passes as teaching children critical thinking is lim-
Children as Tactical Media Participants
127
ited to teaching what is needed to prepare them
for success in a given specialization. This process
of socialization insures that children use their mental skills in a self-managed way when they enter
the workforce. For example, among assembly line
workers, criticism is not a means to reveal the unsaid, or to mine out undisclosed meanings or hidden axiomatic principles. Rather, criticism is used
to recognize how a product or production process
can be made more competitive. Criticism is very
specific and focused in this case, and is only valued
when directly applied within the parameters of production. The worker is rewarded for thinking critically about specific products and processes, but if
this energy is directed toward any other activity,
such as criticizing capital itself, it is marginalized
or punished. The same can be said about inventiveness. These intellectual and creative endeavors are presented as meaningful only within contexts acceptable to the capitalist machine.
For the tactical media practitioner, children are a
significant audience simply because they are the
least exposed to any critical pedagogy (when they
should be the group most engaged with such learning practices). Since children are so deeply immersed within the institutions of the status quo,
any practitioner with pedagogical intent will find
it difficult to penetrate the semiotic regime of capital with even a gleam of light to expose the cells in
which children are incarcerated. Having never experienced any form of autonomy, children have only
vague unspecified desires that tell them that something is missing. However, this unspecified desire
is the very x-factor (a desire which cannot be controlled) that makes children a potential audience.
By finding representations and processes to stimu-
128
Children as Tactical Media Participants
late the desires that the enriched privation of product consumption and alienated labor cannot, tactical media practitioners can help children visualize the possibilities that are withheld from them,
and to realize these possibilities in language and
performance.
In order to reach children, means must be devised
to trespass on their territories. Children are surrounded by many different barriers. One of the
worst is the mass media. The media blanket is very
difficult to penetrate, in spite of many protestations to the contrary. Mass media work well to
promote the ideology of the powerful, but they
work very poorly for minoritarian causes. This is
partly because sign systems work in networks.
When a specific semiotic signal is broadcast, it is
effective only if it meets with systemically sanctioned expectations of the audience members receiving it. For example, to think that a TV broadcast with gay content could “turn” impressionable youth gay (as various right-wing camps claim)
is absurd. In the homophobic U.S., sign systems
are rarely deployed by the socialization apparatus
to support homosexuality. With very few exceptions (a few progressive schools in major cities,
and occasional references on television), any
sexual identity/role system other than heterosexuality is withheld until adulthood, and any contrary tendencies displayed by the child are discouraged or punished. Hence, any positive gay
message (or for that matter, even a message of
acknowledgment and/or tolerance of gay subjectivity) can only make a tentative impression at a
preverbal level. No linguistic matrix is in place
to receive alternative signals. Even those individuals who identify with the message at a nonrational,
Children as Tactical Media Participants
129
nonspecific level still must then find a means to
express the desire in the existing language, one
that is hostile to their desires. Thus the process of
becoming a minority hits a second level of linguistic fortification.
CAE/CDL do not want to be misunderstood as
arguing for a replication of minoritarian systems
by imposing a new sign regime (however alternative). Those producing pedagogical work for children should only provide the means to bring about
a situation in which a process of broad-spectrum
invention, discovery, and criticality can occur.
Tactical media practitioners should not suggest
where the use of these qualities should lead once
unrestrained. When the qualities of self-awareness, criticality, and inventiveness emerge, children can entertain a broad variety of narrative
possibilities in regard to identity and
performativity. Fortunately, these minoritarian
narratives can only function if an individual child
is predisposed by an x-factor desire to be interested,
and if the individual has a capacity for autonomous
action.* Hence, the minoritarian process acts as
its own fail-safe against exploitation and domination, since a child can only be motivated to act on
these possibilities by he/r own desires, and never
by any preinscribed values.
Tactical media practitioners should also note that
individualized interventions are not very useful because the child will not be able to recuperate desire in the company of he/r peers. Children are very
* The need for this capacity eliminates the possibility of reaching
younger children, who generally have not reached this point of
development.
130
Children as Tactical Media Participants
dependent on consensual validation. Since state
institutions are not going to help in the development of minoritarian consciousness, only one place
is left for resistant forces to turn, and that is to the
peer group. While the peer group is often the unwitting agent of ideological replication, the x-factor is alive in this social constellation and can be
liberated.
One suggestion for exciting the x-factor within a
peer group can be found in the writings of the protoanarchist Charles Fourier. He identified four tendencies that he believed conjured excitement and
pleasure in people. The most relevant of these tendencies is the cabal, which refers to taking pleasure in secret, underground, and conspiratorial activities. This notion is useful to aid in creating autonomous situations for children. Children’s first
flirtations with autonomy within the social generally come in the form of the cabal. Here, the peer
group acts as a foundation for productive power that
allows each individual to test the known limits of
the social. Sometimes these groupings can be very
cellular and insulated (friendship groups): other
times children’s cabals can be complete networks,
ranging in form from gaming groups to pop political fronts (such as punk) to drug economies. Such
cells and constellations can be used as distribution
networks for situational stimulants. The problem
is that since children’s desires and the desirous social currents within various networks are liquid, it
is very hard to know what objects or gestures children will respond to. Discovering what will appeal
to them is a roll of the dice.
To complicate matters further, children are key in
structuring punishment and repression. Indeed,
Children as Tactical Media Participants
131
they are material resources that are protected and
thereby intersect with disciplinary and punishment
systems, but they also are of extreme symbolic value.
Children as living signs are prime controllers of
adults. Much of the disciplinary apparatus is based
on the assumption that children must be protected
from the dangers of the adult world. Children are
totalizing signs (much like “nature”) that, once
deployed, cannot be argued with. Anyone who resists the appeal of children must be psychotic, perverted, or just mean-spirited. Children are used to
stop critical discourse and to provide the justification to reinforce the disciplinary apparatus—an
apparatus that has never benefited children, except
to the extent that the needs of children overlap
with the needs of capital. As a general condition,
capital loves the idea of children (much as it loves
nature as its narcissistic mirror), but despises actual children. In the U.S., the heart of transnational
capital, millions of children live in poverty, and
even more do not have adequate health care—the
infant mortality rate is the highest in the first world.
In the third world, the conditions for children of
low social rank are even more unspeakable. Capital only cares for children as a material resource to
the extent that they have the potential to be
molded into beings that suit its needs.
Children as signs are also used for less militarized
forms of repression. Adults are infantilized in order to prod them into acting like “adults” (i.e.,
as agents of capital). Minoritarian political movements are very susceptible to this type of fingerwagging. For example, security agencies often
laugh at politicized hacking as something being
done by kids, pranksters, or adults who have yet
to grow up, thus encouraging the idea of naive
132
Children as Tactical Media Participants
youth rebellion in which underdeveloped, immature people cannot stop replaying the oedipal narrative. At the same time, security agencies in the
U.S. claim that infowar is one of the greatest
threats to national security, and that adequate
funds need to be made available to battle this
new menace by expanding the militarized
cybercorps. Neither of these two scenarios is very
accurate, but both serve their respective purposes
well. The former demeans and marginalizes radical media critique and e-activism, while the latter creates a spectacle of anxiety in resource allocation sectors that will lead to increased funding for police and military agencies. In spite of
this obvious contradiction in rhetoric, one can
be sure that the call for resistant forces to stop
acting like children will be as common as police
persecution of minorities.
Whether one attacks the sign of children in its
many ridiculous manifestations as a disciplinary
code, or reaches out to real populations of children, punishment will be swift and harsh for those
who are caught doing so. Of all the tactical media audiences, this one is the most hazardous. It
is illegal to discuss any topics with children other
than those approved by capital. Those speaking
from a legitimized platform from outside the narrow specializations of parents, teachers, social
workers, or other emissaries of the state are especially discouraged from engaging children in
any critical discussion. For example, artists interested in their own socioeconomic legitimization cannot appeal to kids. They must appeal to
tastemakers, collectors, other culturalists, and so
on. An audience of children is of no career value.
Such artists are infantilized as having lesser tal-
Children as Tactical Media Participants
133
ents that could only appeal to the immaturity of
children. Getting the attention of kids for cultural purposes is only useful in terms of its profit
potential; it has no prestige value, which is what
upgrades a common item to a luxury item, or in
this case, converts amateurish musings into serious art. Nearly all avenues for starting critical
dialogues with children are apparently shut down,
so such an initiative will require extra inventiveness, and quite a bit more research.
Video games, however, provide a good starting
point. Children are already socialized to the form,
so no education is needed. The sticking point is
content. Creating a critical narrative that will
be attractive to kids is not easy. The second big
advantage of using video games for research is
that they have huge children’s networks. For example, Blizzard, the maker of Starcraft, boasts that
35,000 people are visiting its Starcraft web-site
at any given time. Hence, distribution possibilities come prepackaged. This situation has not
gone unnoticed by various politicized groups that
have programming capabilities, to the extent that
hacked games constitute a micro-contestational
front in itself. Neo-Nazis have created death
camp games, and radical left groups such as Mongrel (UK) have created cop- and nazi-icon killing games. To be sure, the state of the art is very
crude in terms of content, but the research shows
that the games are effective in terms of distribution and hours logged by game players. Harwood
of Mongrel claims that kids remain at their events
for hours, attempting to master a game provided
by the group. The question now becomes, how
can the content be made more complex and critical without losing the audience?
134
Children as Tactical Media Participants
Part II
Subverting and Perverting GameBoy
While the multi-user games on the Net have the
greatest advantage in terms of distribution, the
Nintendo GameBoy is a useful site for intervention for two primary reasons. First, the GameBoy
is the top-selling video game console of all time.
When rolling the cultural dice, how can it hurt
to try and break the bank? Should the game take
off among the target audience, it would have a
tremendous effect on the gaming population.
Or, if other capable politicized programmers use
the tools and methods provided to create games
for their own subversive purposes, another important goal would be met. The second reason
for choosing the GameBoy is Nintendo’s obsession with stopping piracy and reverse-engineering of its products. This project will help demonstrate that no product is perfectly fortified,
no matter how many precautions are taken. Everything necessary to rewire a cartridge with a
programmable ROM chip (an EPROM) is now
available. This allows anyone to upload he/r
own game onto the system. Everything necessary to replicate this intervention is
downloadable from <www.carbondefense.org>.
The details for the first game CDL has developed,
Super Kid Fighter (SKF), are outlined below.
The narrative of SKF plays on oedipal desires in
which the game participants can challenge everyday-life socializing agencies. The basis for the
storyline comes from the writings of Wilhelm
Reich regarding children’s sexual rights, and the
concept of a free public brothel for people of all
ages. The game is written as a role-playing game
Children as Tactical Media Participants
135
(RPG), and is primarily text-based. A player must
make correct choices in order to escape authorities, earn money, and gain information that will
help the player find and gain entrance into a
brothel. In SKF, entrance into the brothel is the
final reward of the game.
While this game is complex in its conceptual structure, it’s not a complex game to play. After a few
losses, the player will understand the customs of
the game, and will be able to effectively navigate
the avatar to the brothel at the end of the game.
Story
The setting for SKF is a town structured in grid form.
The player begins the
scen ario at sc hool
where s/he is passed a
note from a classmate
announcing the opening of a free public
brothel in town. Since
none of SKF’s classmates knows the location of
the brothel, the player must find information
elsewhere. The game really begins when
the player escapes from school to search
for the brothel. Since the authorities will
not help in this quest, the
player must rely on marginal groups
to learn the brothel’s location.
Through interaction with characters
outside of the disciplinary apparatus,
the player acquires money (by running numbers,
getting condoms for prostitutes, etc.), purchases
drugs/alcohol, gets directions to the brothel, and
learns techniques to avoid various characters set
136
Children as Tactical Media Participants
on stopping the search. Money can also be acquired by working for local shopkeepers doing
menial tasks for little
pay, but the player
soon learns that this
option is basically a
waste of time and effort. While gathering
information
and
money, SKF is hunted by truant officers, parents,
neighbors, school officials, and church authorities. Most of these
characters can be
avoided simply by
running away; to escape others, crack
is needed for superspeed; while to
evade still others,
such as police officers in cars, requires the help
of street characters. SKF is also armed
with a slingshot with unlimited ammunition, and can
choose to fight when cornered. If a player lingers around one
area or performs no action for an extended period of time, s/he will be attacked by
the specter of guilt. The brothel will only appear
on the grid if a player has proved he/rself to be a
friend of all the people outside the disciplinary
apparatus. Once the
player has entered the
brothel, s/he has the
option to unveil one of
two images—one being
a naked male and the
other a naked female.
The overall favorable rating acquired during the
game determines what percentage of the image
the player will see. This mechanism helps to advance the replay value of the game.
Children as Tactical Media Participants
137
Audience
Market research shows that most GameBoy players
are males between the ages of ten and fifteen.
This is the target audience. There is also a second-party audience—the parents of the children
who may discover the game in the child’s possession. Finally, Nintendo functions as a thirdparty audience. Thus, we assume that eventually one of the carts will make its way to
Nintendo headquarters, which would result in
either a flood of publicity or a silencing of it. In
all, the real purpose of the game is not so much
the play time involved, but the situational possibilities that will be generated as the game is
passed around. Interference from second- and
third-party audiences will only intensify the desired outcome.
Hardware Re-Tooling
(Instructions for Reverse-Engineering the Chip)
Two options currently exist for creating a cart that
can be reprogrammed. We chose to work through
both routes, so as to explain the benefits and pitfalls of each option. The first option requires the
programmer to grab up an existing cart and work
from there. Any cart that contains the following
hardware—ROM+MBC1+RAM+BATTER—is
suitable for re-assignment. A full listing of the actual contents of each cart can be obtained from
the Jeff Frohwein site (http://hiwaay.net/
~jfrohwei/gameboy).
The following list contains names of carts more
widely used for this procedure:
138
Children as Tactical Media Participants
Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Land, Donkey Kong
Land 2, FFL 2, FFL 3, Kirby Blockball, Kirby
Dreamland II, Kirby Star Stacker, Lucle, Mario’s
Picross, Metroid II, Mole Mania, Super MarioLand
II: 6 Golden Coins, Super MarioLand III: MarioLand,
World Cup USA 94, Vegas Stakes, Zelda.
Once you have obtained a cart, the next step is to remove the existing ROM chip and install a
reprogrammable EPROM chip. First, you must carefully cut away the feet of the existing ROM chip.
This can be done with a very sharp X-Acto knife.
You can also simply desolder the chip, but beware,
because both procedures risk pulling off the contact feet on the board. If this happens, you must
start over with a fresh board. Once the chip is removed, you must obtain an EPROM chip from any
major electronics dealer.
EPROM chips suitable for the procedure include:
- AMD AM29F040-150JC
- FUJITSU MBM29F040A-12PD
- TI TMS29F040-12C5FML
- SGS M29F040-150K
The schematic for the EPROM chip insertion into
the GB cart looks like the image below (courtesy
of Jeff Frohwein):
http://hiwaay.net/~jfrohwei/gameboy.
Adjust the EPROM to fit an angle similar to the
schematic here (courtesy of Jeff Frohwein).
Legs may need to be bent apart to make the chip
fit snugly against the board. Solder the pins that
reach the pads and use wire wrap to solder connec-
Children as Tactical Media Participants
139
tions to pins that won’t reach. Install the 47k resistor. One end will connect to pin 31 of the cart connector. Make sure that you tape off at least 75% of
the connector to keep the solder from creeping
down the whole pin. The cart should now be ready
for reprogramming. This may take two to three
hours for each of the first few carts you produce,
but as you get more comfortable with the procedure, you will need to devote less time to the task.
140
Children as Tactical Media Participants
Here is an image of a cart with the original ROM
chip removed and with the new EPROM wired
in its place.
Once the EPROM has been properly inserted into
the cart, you are ready to begin work on the
EPROM programmer. We did this by working off
a printed circuit board and schematic that we
obtained courtesy of Jeff Frohwein. This is probably the simplest way to work. The other option
is to buy a pre-built EPROM programmer from
any major electronics dealer. More information
on programmer specifics can be obtained from
Jeff Frohwein’s site. The schematic and picture
of the programmer we built from Jeff ’s design are
shown below.
Children as Tactical Media Participants
141
If you don’t want to go through the hassle of such a
hands-on procedure, you can modify a cart
through the second option. A company called
Bung of Hong Kong (http://www.bung.com.hk/)
has recently started selling pre-built flash
EPROM GB carts and programmers for a relatively low price. We purchased a few of their carts
and their programmer to do some experimenting a nd
found it a great relief
from the tedious task
of re-soldering large
numbers of boards.
Bung also offers their
own software compiler for their programmer that proved
to be even simpler to use than the hacked compilers we initially used. Both procedures work
well. If you do not have a lot of experience with
hardware, we recommend beginning with the
Bung materials and playing with that before rewiring carts from scratch. Remember that help
is always out there, and we were recipients of
much of this help during the initial stages of our
venture.
Image Conversion
Two types of images must be created for the game. The
first is for background images. To create background
images, we used a converter called PCX2GB available from the MegaMan X z site (http://
digitalparadise.cgocable.ca/MegaMan_X/Projects/).
With this software, we created .pcx files through
PhotoShop and then ran the conversions. The sec-
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Children as Tactical Media Participants
ond type of image that you must create are sprites.
These are the images/characters that are moveable
and cannot be larger than 32 x 32 pixels. For
memory’s sake, it’s best to keep sprites at 16 x 16
pixels. We created sprites pixel by pixel through
the GameBoy Tile Designer, available from Harry
Mulder’s site (http://www.casema.net/~hpmulder/
). The Tile Designer requires a talented illustrator,
since images are created in four shades of gray (remember two of those shades are white and black).
Software Initiation/Programming the Game
This explanation for the game’s development was written by a programmer. If you are not working with a
programmer on your project, keep in mind that
there is a lot of help out there, including help from
the CDL. However, it is best to find someone capable of learning the techniques described below.
SuperKidFighter was written entirely in C using the
GBDK v2.0.17 (written by Pascal Felber and
Michael Hope). We used the No$ emulator (http:/
/www.work.de/nocash/) for testing. A help page
with some information on the function calls does
exist, but outside of that, there is very little documentation to assist you. The best way to figure out
what functions in the gb.h do is to examine the
code examples, or bother Pascal Felber (http://
www.aracnet.com/~pfelber/GBDK/) relentlessly
like we did.
If your application is going to be of any substantial
size, it will not fit entirely into ROM0. Apparently,
there is a limitation on the size of constant data
you can use in lcc. This limit is an lcc limit, however, not a GameBoy limit. In order to use more
Children as Tactical Media Participants
143
GameBoy ROM than lcc will let you, you need to
“ROM Switch.” (The same problem exists for
RAM, but we never hit the ceiling of RAM lcc).
ROM0 is where your main program is loaded and
cannot be switched out, but any other ROM can
be switched into the high ROM area. There is a
caveat: only one other ROM other than ROM0
can be loaded at any time. You create ROM information in .c files, and your makefile will generate
.obj files that are essentially your available ROMs.
The makefile also establishes the ROM numbers
for your ROMs. The following line from my
makefile makes ROM 5 from the code in
D C b a n k _ 5 . c :
..\..\..\bin\lcc -Wa-l -Wf-bo5 -c -o 5.o
DCbank_5.c
To switch ROMs in your code, call
SWITCH_ROM_MBC1(x) [where x is the ROM
you want switched in]. Now, anything in the code for
this ROM is available to you but if you call
SWITCH_ROM_MBC1(y) [where y is any ROM
number other than x], you cannot access anything in
ROM x until you call SWITCH_ROM_MBC1(x)
again. You cannot call SWITCH_ROM_MBC1(y)
from ROM x because you will switch out from where
you are calling from.
We didn’t know that the overall .gb file would run
out of space in ROM0 when we first started SKF, so
we didn’t plan to use ROM Switching. The result
was that we had a fair amount of functionality coded
before running out of room in ROM0. As such,
every time we added something afterwards, we had
to start ROM Switching. We threw code into any
ROM that it would fit into. This led to seriously
ugly code where unrelated elements existed in the
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Children as Tactical Media Participants
same ROM. This also caused us to ROM Switch
far more than we would have had to if we had
planned ahead. Our only word of advice is to design your code with ROM Switching in mind from
the start. Try to keep like data in one ROM where
possible. You won’t use ROM Switching at first,
but you will eventually.
There is room only for 39 sprite tiles and 255 background tiles. This is important. The “art department” at CDL used a bitmap conversion routine
by MegaMan_X to create the graphics data for
SKF. No repeated tiles were used in any background structure. The problem with this is that
there is more background real estate on the
GameBoy screen than there is room in VRAM
for background tiles. It is standard practice in commercial GameBoy game design (and in most spritebased game console development) to “re-use”
sprites and background data. The seemingly neverending streams of “brickrod” in Super
MarioBrothers, “spacefloor” in MegaMan, and
“steel beams” in DonkeyKong are all really one
sprite that is repeatedly displayed over and over.
We did not do this when we started SKF. Only
after all the graphics were done did we discover
that graphic structures designed to cover the whole
background would consist of more than 255 background tiles.
If you are going to use text, use a version of GBDK
> v2.0.17. Not only is the normal text for printf()
grossly oversized for any practical purposes, but calling printf() when not in TEXT mode overrides data
in background VRAM. Our (not too intelligent)
solution was to create alphabet sprite tiles. With
this approach, most of the 39 available sprite tiles
Children as Tactical Media Participants
145
were now occupied, but every new line of text required loading the appropriate alpha tiles into the
remaining sprite tiles and displaying those updated
sprite tiles. This left me with two available sprite
tiles. This was incredibly stupid. Evidently, v2.0.18
and higher of the GBDK provide a cleaner way of
displaying text in graphics mode.
Use the No$ emulator to test .gb files on a PC. We
can’t overstate how important the No$ emulator
was during the coding of SKF. To dump .gb images
onto Bung carts, we used Gangaboy (it’s a dumb
name, but it’s free and it works). It is available from
the Bung site (http://www.bung.com.hk/).
Finally, throw out everything you know about
game programming. If you’re familiar with MSDOS game programming or with the DirectX
SDK, forget about concepts such as double buffering, blitting, surfaces, Win messages, Mode13,
other applications clipping your window, stretching images for different display modes, etc. For
example, there is no need to capture the background data before displaying a sprite and replacing that background data when the sprite is moved.
If the sprite is moved, the “Dig Dug” effect of losing background data does not happen. The sprite
is simply moved to the new position and the background data for the former position of the sprite is
restored. There is no need to move the sprite or
change backgrounds in a back buffer or “secondary surface.” You can move the sprite in the “primary surface” and no tearing occurs. Also, there
is not an infinite number of resolution modes,
video cards, and input devices that you have to
write special code for. If it works on your GameBoy,
it will work on any GameBoy.
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Children as Tactical Media Participants
Game Building Tools
Mega Man X PCX2GB can be found here:
http://digitalparadise.cgocable.ca/MegaMan_X/Projects/
Jeff Frohwein’s GameBoy Tech Page (too useful to
describe): http://home.hiwaay.net/~jfrohwei/gameboy/
Bung Enterprises prebuilt carts and programmers available here: http://www.bung.com.hk/
Pascal Felber GBDK available here: http://
www.aracnet.com/~pfelber/GBDK/
Harry Mulder’s GameBoy Development GBTD and
GBMB available here: http://www.casema.net/
~hpmulder/
The RGBDS Zone GameBoy
specific assembler software available here:
http://www.matilde.demon.co.uk/rgbzone.htm
Groove’s GameBoy Page
A good source for software examples:
http://freespace.virgin.net/stephen.blanksby/
Reiner Ziegler’s Web Page ReadPlus
software available for cart construction available here:
http://vs-info.de/ziegler/
NoCash Funware No$GB Emulator available here:
http://www.work.de/nocash
8
The Financial
Advantages of Anti-copyright
Speed and wealth go hand in hand.
—Paul Virilio
One of the constant concerns of cultural producers
about the anti-copyright movement is how they
can be compensated for their labor and not lose
their work without engaging legitimized procedures for obtaining ownership. This problem has
not been addressed by prominent figures in the
plagiarism, electronic mirroring, and anti-copyright movements, who seem content to develop
the principles of the movements more on theoretical rather than practical levels. The oldest
(tracing back to Lautréamont) and most common
position (Debord, Home, Benjamin, Gyson, Isou,
Kraus, as well as the Karen Eliot, ®TMark, and
Originally published in Libres Enfants du Savoir Numerique: Une
Anthologie du “Libre” (Paris: Editions de l'Éclat).
150
The Financial Advantages of Anti-copyright
Luther Blisset Projects) taken as to why information should not be privatized is the belief that
experimentation and invention would be hindered by lack of access to the building blocks of
culture. Once cultural artifacts (images or language) are privatized, they become cultural capital, and hence function to reinforce hierarchical
social strata like any other form of capital.
Privatization of culture is a process through
which meaning is stabilized within ideological
codes that serve the status quo. In addition, privatizing cultural artifacts elevates the producer to
the false status of metaphysical creator and surrounds the makers with the false aura of mystic
individualism. The truth of the matter is that
they have simply participated in the general cultural practice of recombination—a process in
which representation as a reflection of individuated genius has no reality except as a cynical ploy
to generate sales of the artifacts. Further, privatized culture is market culture, and since cultural
resisters do not want to give the market anything
more to present as “new,” tactics to create new
meanings from common representation have been
developed over the past century. Perhaps these
tactics are about as concrete as the discourse on
anti-copyright gets, although there are the more
cavalier thoughts on the matter, such as the idea
that participating in privatization is a sellout to
market demands. Yet to avoid this fate in late capital, one can only choose to be a garret artist (another sad stereotype created by capital to undermine the development of social identity and solidarity) or sell out elsewhere (i.e., work). No matter where a cultural producer turns, there is no
real practical advice, and one only finds the imperatives of ideological purity or abstract theory.
The Financial Advantages of Anti-copyright
151
However, practical observations in regard to anticopyright can be made. First, copyright is not about
individual access or use (even though that is often
a side effect). The two key principles for the existence of copyright are to protect one institution from
the aggression of another, and to maintain exclusive control over a product so that the highest
amount of profit that the market will bear can be
obtained. In neither of these cases is the individual
a part of the process. These principles are fairly
simple. In any form of capitalism, an institution
that competes with another will do anything to
undermine its competitor and insure its own survival, and that includes stealing products (industrial espionage, particularly at the international
level, is a fact of business). Luxury products are the
least prone, while digital products are the most
prone—seemingly bad news for writers, video/film
makers, recording musicians, and Net/Web artists).
Copyright regulations temper and slow the process
of theft, and obfuscate the public perception of
product acquisition as being little more than open
piracy. If the process of theft can be slowed down,
the product and the market can be reasonably well
managed, but this is all at the macro level. From
the market perspective, theft at the individual level
is something that must be endured. Photocopies of
books will be made, photos of artworks taken,
sounds will be sampled, duplicates of video produced, and copies of all these things will be passed
around from person to person.
Here is where the confusion sets in: Individual cultural producers (in the broadest sense of the term)
are worried about being denied compensation for
their work due to unbridled duplication. This is a
false anxiety. Unless an artist is transformed into
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The Financial Advantages of Anti-copyright
an institution, there is no need to worry. For example, Elvis was transformed from an individual
into an institution. “Elvis” does not refer to a human being; it refers to videos, films, records, and
all kinds of merchandise. Elvis the individual is so
irrelevant to the formula that he does not even have
to be alive for “Elvis” to continue. Celebrities in
whatever cultural field are no longer people; they
are institutions that need to protect their capital,
which is why they need copyright. However, for
those who are still individual producers, copyright
is not necessary—in fact, in most cases it’s counterproductive. For example, let’s say a writer has
published a book that will sell five to ten thousand
copies. No major publisher cares about that; too
little profit is involved for them to pirate the book
and risk legal ramifications. Of course, there will
be people who will photocopy it and pass around
copies. Who knows, someone may even key it into
the Net and offer it for free, while small publishing
houses in other countries may translate and publish it. CAE argues that such activities will only
help in the long term, and should be encouraged
through anti-copyright. The more people know of
a work, the more likely they are to buy it, and it’s
very likely that commissions, lectures, and other
fund-generating opportunities will follow from this
situation. The money lost through the gifting of
the text will be remade in other ways. The faster
the information is disseminated, the better it is for
the many discourses to which the information is
relevant, and on the individual level, more money
will be generated. Speed and replication develop
funds in the digital era! Slowing the process down
with copyright is counterproductive, both in terms
of individual compensation as well as in terms of
resistant cultural production.
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